TLDR Block Building is a crucial aspect of Ethereum’s lifecycle consisting of various moving part. It determines which transactions get included in a block and in what order, directly impacting network efficiency, decentralization, and fairness. Over time, Ethereum’s block production process has evolved, especially with the growing role of MEV and the shift from validator-driven selection to specialized builders. This post will discuss how Ethereum Block Building has evolved along with the introduction of Proposer Builder Separation and future research. Thank you to @mteam, @Gajpower and @unnawut for reviewing and providing suggestions. Primer on Ethereum Block Building Components Slots and Epochs Ethereum organizes time into discrete units:

In the realm of modern cryptography, secure communication over potentially insecure channels is a crucial challenge. One of the earliest and most revolutionary breakthroughs to address this problem was the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. It allowed two parties to create a shared secret key over a public channel without revealing that key to eavesdroppers. Well, in my persepective the keys aren't actually "shared" in the traditional sense. You'll see what I mean by this. Understanding the problem Let us assume there are 5 people standing in a line. The first person is Alice and the last person in the line is Bob. Alice wants to share a secret with Bob and the only way to communicate in this scenario is by passing the message to the person on your right(say on a piece of paper). As you may have already guessed, this poses some serious security issues since this means, everyone else in the line will find out the secret as it travels from Aice to Bob. Although this example doesn't fully justify the state of real world insecure communication channels, you get the idea(I hope). image

Lagrange Interpolation Sounds scary? Probably more than it should. Lagrange Interpolation is a method to find an equation passing through a given set of points. Lagrange Interpolation Formula Given a set of data points $( (x_0, y_0), (x_1, y_1), \dots, (x_n, y_n) )$, the goal is to find a polynomial $P(x)$ such that: $$P(x_i) = y_i \quad \text{for each } i.$$

Fields Fields denoted by {F,+,x} are a set of elements which consists of 2 binary operations and must have the following properties: Closure: For any a,b in F, the result of (a+b) or (a.b) will also be a member of the Field F i.e if (a.b)=c, then c belongs to the set F as well. Associative: For any a,b,c in F: $$a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c$$ $$a.(b.c)=(a.b).c$$ Commutative: For any a,b in F: $$a+b=b+a$$ $$a.b=b.a$$ Additive Identity: There exists an element e in F such that for all a in F: $$a + e = e + a = a$$