Flashbots

Flashbots

Flashbots is a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities and existential risks posed by MEV. They aim to Democratize MEV Extraction through MEV-Geth, which enables a sealed-bid block space auction mechanism for communicating transaction order preference.

ELI5 Link: https://twitter.com/_silto_/status/1381292907567722498

Flashbots created an ETH node for miners, that not only watches the mempool like any other node, but also connects to a relayer (a server) operated by Flashbots. This MEV-Relay is a kind of parallel channel that directly connects miners to bots that want their transactions included.

The transactions that the bots want to include are sent through the MEV-Relay as bundles containing:

• the transactions to execute

• a tip to the miner, coming as an ETH transfer

These transactions use a 0 gwei gas price, as the payment to the miner is included in the transaction itself as the tip.

Since these transactions are sent through a parallel private relay, it reduces the mempool bidding war, failed transactions bloating the blockchain, and overall gas cost for users.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/flashbots

• Research: https://github.com/flashbots/mev-research

• Monthly Meetings: https://github.com/flashbots/pm

• API: https://blocks.flashbots.net/

• Discord: https://discord.gg/7hvTycdNcK

• Medium: https://medium.com/flashbots

• https://medium.com/flashbots/frontrunning-the-mev-crisis-40629a613752

• https://medium.com/flashbots/quantifying-mev-introducing-mev-explore-v0-5ccbee0f6d02

• https://ethresear.ch/t/flashbots-frontrunning-the-mev-crisis/8251