A collection of articles and papers from Flashbots.
Flashbots Protect is the longest running and most used private RPC in crypto. Since 2021, Protect has been used by 2.1 million Ethereum accounts to protect $43 billion in DEX volume and earn 313 ETH in refunds. Today, on its third anniversary, we look back on Protect’s journey and where it’s going next:
Recent months have seen an awakening of several large use cases of TEEs, from OpenAI calling for new and improved TEEs and Apple announcing a hardware-based private cloud, to Ethereum transactions being privately processed in TDX and other blockchains leveraging SGX for integrity. Having worked quite closely with several use cases that are at the center of this excitement, we are aware of both the promise which secure hardware holds, and of the current insufficiency of today’s hardware to service these use cases. TEE solutions currently on the market simply do not offer sufficient security guarantees while alternative secure hardware families like TPMs, secure elements and smart cards offer better (although not perfect) security guarantees at the cost of needed performance and functionality. For the first time, there is substantial industry demand for high-power, high-performance hardware that is secure under a comprehensive threat model.
We’ve developed a platform for performance, programmability, and decentralization extensions for Rollups. It is powering the upcoming Unichain.
Today, we are announcing Rollup-Boost, a verifiable block building platform for rollups, enabled by Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) technology. Rollup-Boost was co-designed with Uniswap Labs and OP Labs, and its first deployment powers the upcoming Unichain, enabling fast confirmation times, strong user guarantees, and MEV internalization for the next generation of Defi apps.
Wallets are the gateway to Web3, serving as essential portals for users to send and receive messages, manage funds, and interact with blockchain applications. As a critical piece of blockchain infrastructure, wallets significantly shape users' Web3 experiences.
The wallet ecosystem is diverse, with providers offering varied products and services through different mechanisms. As wallet providers strive for sustainability and diversification, their operational models are evolving, creating new dynamics between users, applications, and the underlying blockchain infrastructure.
Our report aims to illuminate the current state of wallets on Ethereum, building upon the research conducted by orderflow.art.
This article examines the application of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) space. Our approach allows searchers to blindly backrun user transactions using FHE. This prototype demonstrates how a searcher can compute the future price of a UniswapV2 pool over a user transaction, keeping it encrypted throughout the process. Although this method is not currently practical for deployment, it serves as a foundation for future improvement and expansion, which we discuss in the conclusion.
An open and efficient block building ecosystem is essential to Ethereum. In order to catalyze further innovation and collaboration in block building, Flashbots has open sourced rbuilder, our latest and most performant block builder written in Rust, and designed to work with Reth.
We believe that sharing the responsibility and benefits of advancing block building creates a positive sum game for all Ethereum stakeholders. rbuilder is designed to be developed and stewarded by the community, and open sourcing it will accelerate this future.
We encourage developers to contribute to rbuilder, all teams to develop their builders in the open, and the community to only trust builders who follow the norms of transparency and free software.
The Dencun fork is a major Ethereum upgrade planned for over 2 years and recently went live on March 13 at epoch 29696. This upgrade introduces blob transactions, designed to reduce transaction costs for rollups. This post will detail Flashbots’ engineering work in preparation for the upgrade.
This post presents Sirrah, a minimalist demo of extending a blockchain with confidential computing using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). We'll cover the development end-to-end: starting from Gramine-SGX and ordinary REVM, and ending with MEV-aware auction application... and a timelock encryption demo that you can try right now.
We live in a world where decentralized finance ("defi") market structure and transaction execution is constantly changing, and poorly understood by most. Among this complexity, it is easy to forget that defi's market structure today is meaningfully different from the current state of traditional finance ("tradfi"). From the roots of a permissionless, global, decentralized genesis, defi is already well along the path to addressing a number of the criticisms levied at tradfi execution, by market participants and regulators alike.
Users should be able to see and control how their transactions are processed in the MEV supply chain. In order to bring more transparency to orderflow auctions, Flashbots has open sourced our implementation of a MEV-Share Node.
Transparency in the MEV supply chain is critical for parties that create orderflow (eg. users, wallets, and dapps) to make informed decisions. It also enables other actors like builders and searchers to better understand the guarantees and requirements of the systems they integrate.
We encourage all teams to develop their orderflow auctions in the open, and we advise the community to work with OFAs that follow the norms of free and open source software.
The Flashbots Node is one of several references and tools for MEV-Share that Flashbots has open sourced, including:
Join us in building a more decentralized and transparent MEV supply chain.