MEV.wtf

Date: Thursday, Jul 1, 2021
Time: 11:30 - 19:00 ET / 8:30 - 16:00 PT / 15:30 - 23:00 UTC
Register for the event: ETHGlobal Summit
Watch live stream: ethglobal.tv
Format: defi.wtf meets MEV Roast
Brought to you by: Flashbots MEV Fellowship & ETHGlobal
For researchers: MEV Fellowship grants
For ETHGlobal HackMoney hackers: MEV Fellowship prizes
Master Slides | video recap

Special thanks to Sunny Aggarwal, Surya Bakshi, Vitalik Buterin, Rick Dudley, Gengmo, Daniel Goldman, Hasu, Mahimna Kelkar, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Robert Miller, Mikerah, Alex Obadia, pmcgoohan, Alejo Salles, Lakshman Sankar, Tom Schmidt, Tina Zhen and Flashbots Research for contributing to the agenda.

The agenda may be subject to change. Please check back for the latest schedule. If you would like the speakers and or panelists to address a specific question on each topic, please propose your Roast Questions under any relevant topic you would like to see discussed.

1. The Evolution of MEV - 75min

  • 11:30 - 11:45 ET | WTF is MEV (slides) - Charlie Noyes (Paradigm)
  • 11:45 - 12:00 ET | When cryptoeconomics breaks? (slides) - Phil Daian (Flashbots)
  • 12:00 - 12:15 ET | MEV after EIP-1559 (slides) - Alejo Salles (Flashbots)
  • 12:15 - 12:45 ET | (Panel) MEV & interoperability: roll-ups, cross-L2 and cross-chain - James Prestwich (moderator), John Adler (Celestia), Eli Ben-Sasson (Starkware), Ed Felten (Arbitrium), Ben Jones(Optimism), Zaki Manian (iqlusion)
    • Q1: How does your system handle cross-domain communication? Specifically interested in latency, what domains it communicates with, security parameters, etc.
    • Q2: What specific apps do you see using cross-domain comms? Do any of these exist in the wild? Is there a use case that's not a token bridge?
    • Q3: How does cross-domain MEV differ from MEV within a single chain or L2?
    • Q4: What unique challenges does cross-chain messaging pose to MEV extraction? What about for devs or users that want to defend against MEV?
    • Q5: Some MEV defenses rely on hiding transaction contents. Is privacy in cross-domain messaging a priority? Is it even achievable?

2. Framing the MEV problem - 30min

  • 12:45 - 13:00 ET | Classifying MEV and Identifying potential solutions (slides) - Sunny Aggarwal (Osmosis)
  • 13:00 - 13:15 ET | Mapping the MEV solution space (slides) - Hasu
  • 13:15 - 13:30 ET | Is MEV a problem to be solved or a reality to live with? (slides) - Lakshman Sankar (Ethereum Foundation)

3. Protocol-level response to MEV - 195min

3.1 MEV minimization techniques - 120min

3.1.1 Fair ordering

3.1.2 Privacy solutions

  • 14:45 - 15:00 ET | Survey of privacy solutions to MEV mitigation (slides) - Mikerah (Hashcloak)
  • 15:00 - 15:30 ET | (Panel) Privacy all the way down: Tackling MEV at different layers using cryptography - Mikerah (Moderator), Automata (Deli Gong), Anoma (Christopher Goes), Secret Network (Can Kisagun), Shutter Network (Jannik Luhn), Sikka (Dev Ojha)，Ethereum Foundation (Barry Whitehat)
    • Q1: What cryptographic or privacy techniques your project uses to minimize/eliminate MEV for your users?
    • Q2: What are the pros and cons of using your technique at L1/L2/application layer?
    • Q3: What kinds of applications are best suited for the kinds of techniques being discussed for minimizing/eliminating MEV?
    • Q4: What are the worst case failure scenarios for each technique and how does your implementation recover/mitigate this?

3.2 MEV democratization approaches - 75min

3.3 The State and Future of MEV

  • 16:00 - 16:45 ET | (Panel) The Meta MEV Discussions (doc) - Hasu (moderator), Vitalik Buterin, Phil Daian (Flashbots), Mahimna Kelkar (Cornell), Georgios Konstantopoulos (Paradigm), Dan Robinson (Paradigm)
    • The State of MEV
    • On Flashbots
    • Fair Ordering
    • On Uniswap
    • On Ethereum

4. Application-level response to MEV - 135min

4.1 MEV & DeFi

  • 16:45 - 17:00 ET | How to re-design your defi protocol around MEV? (slides) - Tom Schmidt (Dragonfly Capital)

4.2 MEV mitigations

  • 17:00 - 17:10 ET | (Batch Auctions & offchain ordering) Cowswap & Gnosis (slides) - Felix Leupold (Gnosis)
  • 17:10 - 17:20 ET | (Limit Order) 0x RFQ - MEV proof + zero slippage trades (slides) - Amir Bandeali (0x)
  • 17:20 - 17:30 ET | (Backrunning Service) - A2MM: Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability (slides) - Kaihua Qin (Imperial College), Liyi Zhou (Imperial College)
  • 17:30 - 17:40 ET | (Privacy) Shutter Network: Preventing Frontrunning Using Threshold Encryption (slides) - Jannik Luhn (Shutter Network)

4.3 MEV redistribution

  • 17:40 - 18:20 ET | (Panel) MEV re-distribution game - Tom Schmidt (moderator), Ivan Bogartyy (MiningDAO), Joey Zacherl (KeeperDAO), Yaron Velner (b-protocol), Uri Klarman (Bloxroute)
    • Q1: Imagine a world where MEV continues to exist as it does today without protocol re-designs. Is there a “fair” distribution of MEV in your mind? How do you achieve that?
    • Q2: In a world where MEV shifts away from miners and bots, do you think it’s more likely that it shifts to DAOs / protocols or just back to individuals? Is there some third option?
    • Q3: Thoughts on shift to PoS? What are some potential second-order effects of the move to PoS wrt MEV accrual that we might not be seeing right now? What about rollups?
    • Q4: What’s the next frontier on the bot space? Is generalized frontrunning the end game, or are there novel techniques and technologies you see people employing now or in the future to get an edge?

4.4 Hybrid model of MEV minimization & democratization

  • 18:20 - 19:00 ET | (Panel) MEV: Next frontier of the DeFi stack - Dan Elitzer (moderator), Luciano Bertenasco (Yearn), Joe Delong (Sushiswap), Scott Bigelow (Flashbots), 1inch (TBC)
    • Q1: How much of a negative impact do you think MEV has on DeFi users and protocols today?
    • Q2: Can you give any examples of features you’ve either designed with MEV in mind or considered and discarded due to MEV concerns?
    • Q3: A protocol’s MEV represents a lower bound of the value being extracted from the protocol and its users by outside parties. To the extent that some amount of MEV is unavoidable, have you considered any approaches protocols might use to internalize MEV opportunities to the benefit of tokenholders or protocol users?
    • Q4: DeFi users today tend to interact with protocols directly through an official front-end. How much responsibility do dapp developers have to implement some sort of MEV protection or private transaction submission to protect their users at the interface level? Is this more of a wallet-level issue?
    • Q5: Assuming composability tradeoffs were not a major issue for a particular DeFi protocol, should they ever consider launching on an application-specific rollup (or other chain) where sequencing is tied to governance tokens in some way?
Select a repo