EPF Week 13 + 14 Updates

Hey folks, This is my updates for week 13 and 14 combined! I was fairly busy at my day job so I thought it would be better if I combined my updates.

TLDR; PEPC-Boost successfully proposed some blocks on Goerli! I allowed searchers to start bidding for multiple slots for PEPC-Boost and deployed it to Goerli. Blocks were successfully proposed. I started to think of PEPC-Boost from a product perspective rather then just a technical perspective. This involved reading a bunch of articles and brainstorming. I also implemented a feature in PEPC-Boost to allow rebuilding latest submitted ToB bids with previous high value RoB bids. I am currently writing an article highlighting my thoughts. I wrote a kurtosis package to launch an adminer instance to visualise postgres payloads. I integrated it with the kurtosis ethereum devnet environment. It is currently being reviewed to be upstreamed.

Project Updates

PEPC-Boost proposed it's first blocks! It is an example of a parallel block auction on Ethereum. Below is an example slot at which a block was proposed from PEPC-Boost:

https://prater.beaconcha.in/slot/6783851

I expanded PEPC-Boost to allow searchers to submit more txs to include in the top of block

Impl: https://github.com/bharath-123/pepc-boost-relay/pull/54
Tests: https://github.com/bharath-123/pepc-boost-relay/pull/55

This was deployed to the Goerli setup and blocks were successfully proposed. Below is an example slot at which a block was proposed from PEPC-Boost where multiple slots were opened up:

https://prater.beaconcha.in/slot/6754704

I wrote a tweet describing these blocks:

https://twitter.com/BharathVedarth1/status/1717252057160175667

I implemented a feature in PEPC-Boost which allows latest high value ToB txs to be re-built with past RoB blocks for the same slot and parent hash. Currently, RoB blocks are discarded after they are paired with a high value ToB bid. If searchers send high value ToB txs subsequently, they might not get paired with high value RoB blocks submitted in the past which can prevent the validators from getting the highest possible value block from PEPC-Boost. I implemented RoB block cachine and re-building in the below PR.

Impl + tests: https://github.com/bharath-123/pepc-boost-relay/pull/60

This is yet to be deployed on Goerli.

I spent a lot of time reading different articles on the builder and searcher market to get a better sense of how PEPC-Boost fits into the eco-system and what role it can play. Some of the readings I have been doing are the below:

https://frontier.tech/builder-dominance-and-searcher-dependence
https://frontier.tech/a-tale-of-two-arbitrages
https://frontier.tech/a-new-game-in-town

I am working on writing an article to discuss my understanding of PEPC-Boost from a product perspective. I will add it to my next week dev-updates.

Open source PRs

I have been working with Kurtosis to add an adminer instance which is useful for visualising the database entries on the MEV-Boost relayer. If adminer is not present, we will have to inspect the elements using SQL queries which can get a bit tedious.

I had to write a new kurtosis package which was a good experience. Please find the link to the package below:
https://github.com/bharath-123/db-adminer-package

Below are the PRs for integrating them with the kurtosis ethereum devnet:
https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/postgres-package/pull/10
https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/ethereum-package/pull/295

I am working with the Kurtosis team to see if this can be upstreamed!!

Conclusion

My next steps are to work on ideating w.r.t https://github.com/bharath-123/pepc-boost-relay/issues/22. I want to find designs where we can solve for payouts with parallel block auctions as the builder doesn't know the MEV in full at the time of proposing a block segment.

I want to write a document highlighting my thoughts of how PEPC-Boost fits into Ethereum. Basically I want to talk about PEPC-Boost more from a product perspective rather then just a technical perspective.

I want to start creating the final PPT which I am going to present on EPF day!

I want to try to upstream the db-adminer package to kurtosis!