Thanks to Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Barnabé Monnot, Fahad Saleh, Thomas Thiery, and Davide Crapis for the discussions and feedback that led to this post. Thanks to the Shutter team and Luis Bezzenberger, in particular, for helpful conversations around encrypted mempools. Thanks to the organizers and participants of the CBER CtCe Conference, where I presented a version of what was to become this post. The banner image depicts the division of labor between highly sophisticated financial builders, more unsophisticated proposers (building on Justin Drake’s vision of Zen staking), and attesters noting what is being said.

This post was inspired by discussions with Thomas Thiery, Barnabé Monnot, Francesco D’Amato, and Maneesha Papireddygari.

Thanks to Barnabé Monnot, Thomas Thiery, and Data Always for their feedback and discussions.

Many thanks to Thomas Thiery and Barnabé Monnot for discussions on this topic.

Many thanks to Barnabé Monnot and Davide Crapis for their feedback and discussions.

Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) calls for choice on auction mechanism design. In this post we consider what the effect is of different auction mechanisms on MEV

Structuring base fee derivatives is hard. In this article we give a rough example of how next-block base fee options could be designed.

How to design financial instruments that let users hedge against gas price movements in a non-manipulable and mutually advantageous manner.