Attributes
- Author: @0xMo0nR3kt3r
- Recipient: @0xMo0nR3kt3r
- Category: Relays to archival nodes (Polygon, future: Arbitrum and Optimism)
- Asking Amount: A high number of relays to archival nodes
Summary
MEV is a very obscure topic with very little public information and open-source code. This is true for Ethereum and even more so for L2s. We are a team of 2 researchers partnering with Flashbots to shed some light onto the dark forest by working on Quantifying MEV on L2s (Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism). To do so, we need to make a lot of requests to archival Polygon nodes.
Proposal
What we offer
We want to partner with the Pocket DAO and/or PNI, to subside relays for the research, in exchange for which we shall thank and praise Pocket Network and how useful of a tool it is in our research. The media on which the research is going to be published includes:
- a research paper
- a Twitter thread
- a Medium article
- a presentation to the Flashbots team
- a publication on Flashbots website
- Flashbots will probably also share the research on their own media, thus increasing the reach
Note that the acknowledgement of Pocket Network’s support would be included in all media under our control, not just the twitter thread or the research paper.
MEV being such an “obscure” topic, most of the space is lurking on Twitter or the Flashbots website/forum/discord. There is not many MEV related conferences except for some Flashbots events nor is their particular journals. We are open to suggestions of conferences or journals where it could be published as well.
This is the opportunity to make Pocket known to the MEV community, where a lot of organizations are either:
- searching for MEV on different blockchains
- doing academic-like research like our own
“Pocket Network bringing transparency to the obscure MEV space” is a very attractive headline that shall increase Pocket Network’s popularity in the MEV space, where organizations constantly need to make lots of RPC requests.
What we are asking for
For each chain, we are looking at all MEV transactions and we will need to do 1 query per transaction.
It is quite hard to quantify the number of relays needed beforehand because this is precisely the end goal of the research. I can give a lower bound of 1 request per 2 blocks (assuming there is 1 MEV tx every 2 blocks on average) but this is very vague and the upper bound will be even more vague.
Below is the distribution of the number of MEV txs per block on a non representative sample on Polygon:
But it could very well be that there will be a single block or 2 that are very skewed and shift the average. Also note that it tends to jump over time:
Timeline
We have been working for months on the topic, you can see the repo here. It is ready to run for the whole history of chains, the paper is 90% written, only the results and their interpretation are missing.
[EDIT to add answers to the below questions as information in the proposal]