Targeting Zero MEV - A Content Layer Solution

[pmcgoohan]

Hi @tim0x. Thanks for reading.

You are right that this is an issue, although unlike at the moment it is possible to protect yourself against it. There has been some discussion of this on the other thread…

@pmcgoohan

Alex is way fairer than what we have now and mitigates a lot of MEV, but the problem is tx bloat.

Essentially with random ordering an attacker can give themselves a better chance of a good outcome by adding n txs.

However if another attacker does the same thing, they end up with no better chance and higher tx fees.

If a third (or more) attacker does the same thing, they all end up losing big.

If the would be victim also splits their tx into multiple txs they can protect themselves again.

So Alex fixes inequality, but at the cost of increasing the tx rate (by approx: extra tx count = arb value / failed tx cost)

I don’t think the community is ready for a solution which leads to this level of tx bloat, and I’m not sure I’d want to be responsible for it.

That’s what got me thinking about encrypted mempool/fair ordering variants of Alex.

What finally turned me off random ordering (for L1- it could still work on L2) was being shown this issue #21350 where Geth randomly ordered txs with the same gas price.
Apparently it led to tx bloat from backrunning attacks, so is quite a good real world proxy for the kind of issues random ordering systems may have.

re this:

@tim0x

I don’t see how two layers of pickers helps mitigate this in any way. Sure it eliminates collusion by the block orderer, but don’t you still get frontrun? I’m still reading through your full documentation, so maybe this is answered somewhere or I am missing something.

So the answer is not really because you can split your transactions as much as any attacker can. We have fairness but at the cost of tx bloat and raised costs. Hence looking at enc mempool and fair ordering variants.

The thing to focus on with Alex is the idea of bringing order to the mempool by chunking it up, and the flexibility this gives you with trying different consensus ordering schemes/MEV mitigations without harming UX.