Flashbots
Flashbots is an MEV-focused company that has synthesized live on-chain data to categorize and sort rogue MEV transactions for the community, on their MEV Explore page
Flashbots is a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities and existential risks posed by miner-extractable value (MEV) to smart-contract blockchains.
They have built out tooling to quantify MEV and eliminate the information asymmetry in the ecosystem. They are now implementing a proof of concept for permissionless MEV extraction called MEV-Geth, a sealed-bid block space auction mechanism for communicating transaction order preference.
Flashbots’ goal is to make sure MEV incentives do not become opaque and undemocratic. Hopefully, their infrastructure will allow application developers to better understand how to minimize their MEV exposure, and let some pressure off that could otherwise accumulate into really harmful externalities (e.g., a time-bandit attack).
Flashbots approach to migigating the crisis is broken down to 3 parts: Illuminate the Dark Forest, Democratize Extraction, and Distribute Benefits.
Flashbots aim to illuminate the dark forest through the MEV-Inspect method, which scans Ethereum blocks and provides a visualization of MEV metrics over time. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the MEV ecosystem and provide it to the community in an attempt to remove information asymmetry.
In order to democratize extraction, the MEV-Geth method, which is an upgrade to the go-ethereum client, enables a sealed-bid block space auction mechanism for communication transaction order preference. It creates a better channel for communication between miners and traders bidding for inclusion of their transactions.
As MEV extraction continues to grow, Flashbots predict that there will be a need for some value distribution towards users and system stability. Therefore, as well as mitigating the risks, Flashbots aim to replace said risks with virtuous economic cycles in order to reinforce Ethereum's core values.
Their technical proposal can be found here.
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