Thanks to Sarisht Wadhwa, Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka, and Anders Elowsson for feedback on the post. Thanks to Thomas Thiery, Barnabé Monnot, and Caspar Schwarz-Schilling for discussions on the idea. FOCIL is an inclusion list design proposed to be included in Ethereum via EIP-7805. The EIP does not include a reward mechanism for inclusion list committee members, or includers, since the additional complexity is currently not warranted. However, such a reward mechanism would contribute to the robustness of FOCIL in the long-term. Designing a reward mechanism is complicated. The objective may be to incentivize includers to include transactions that the block producer may otherwise exclude. The objective may also be to improve the long-term composition of the includer set to encourage includers to contribute to the long-term goals of FOCIL. These goals may overlap but may not be entirely equal.

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.