17 posts tagged with "mev"

EIP-8375 proposes two one-third burns. It burns one third of transaction priority fees in every payload, and it sets an external builder's auction target to one third of the signed gross bid. That sounds additive. It is not.

In a fixed signed-number backcast across 89,994 canonical MEV-Boost blocks, the two standalone amounts were 408.394 ETH and 326.692 ETH. Adding them gives 735.086 ETH, but the draft's actual credit rule burns 469.829 ETH. The missing 265.257 ETH is overlap, equal to 36.1% of the naive sum.

The slashing proof for the April 2023 mev-boost relay exploit did not land in the next block, or even the next hour. It was included 4,474 slots later: 14 hours, 54 minutes, and 48 seconds. Every other canonical proposer-slashing proof on Ethereum landed one or two slots after the conflicting header.

A six-hour moving average that only sees one hour is not smoothing much. At 23:00 UTC on July 10, Xatu's fct_proposer_reward_hourly stored 0.303736 ETH in its moving_avg_reward_eth field. The actual six-hour mean was 0.017821 ETH.

The 17x gap came from one 12.506337 ETH relay-delivered block, included eleven seconds after the hour began. Because it landed first, the stored calculation kept re-counting it through almost every cumulative average in that hour. The previous five hours never entered the window.

I started with the boring version of the question: which MEV-Boost relay has share?

The data immediately refused to answer it cleanly.

Correction, August 19, 2026: The 55.5 GB all-history figure and the 24 GB December excess below were wrong. December's published 61.4 GB already exceeded the claimed all-history total. After xatu-cbt repaired a multi-shard aggregation bug and rebuilt the receipt models, the same fixed month is 42.19 GB and the logical RLP total through March 7 is 1.315 TB. Those bytes are not a measurement of node disk use, so I am also retracting the storage-externality estimate. Read the full correction.

Transaction receipts are one of those parts of Ethereum that node operators silently carry but rarely talk about. Every full node stores every receipt for every transaction ever executed: gas used, status, and — crucially — every event log the transaction emitted. That accumulates fast.

As of March 2026, Ethereum's full receipt history weighs in at 55.5 GB across roughly 430 days of post-Merge data tracked in EthPandaOps' xatu dataset. Growing at about 1.65 GB per day, it's manageable. But in early December, something broke that trend spectacularly.

Every Ethereum block has the same skeleton: a list of transactions, ordered from position 0 to whatever the builder packed in. Naively, you'd assume position 0 belongs to the highest-paying user — priority fee sorts everything. But that's not what the data shows.

Half of all position-0 transactions pay zero priority fee. And paradoxically, they are the safest transactions in the entire block — reverting at 0.027%. The tail of the block (positions 200-400) reverts 60× more often.

Every MEV dashboard focuses on the same number: the execution layer bid that the winning builder pays the proposer. It's tracked obsessively. Tournaments are run around it. Entire firms exist to maximise it. And for 93% of blocks proposed on mainnet right now, it's the smaller of the two income streams the proposer receives.

The other stream — the consensus layer's attestation inclusion reward — sits quietly in the background, never shown on dashboards, never cited in "MEV revenue" charts. It's roughly four and a half times larger than the median MEV-boost payment.

Ethereum's validator exit queue is public, deterministic, and slow. When a large entity starts withdrawing, you know — to the epoch — when their stake will land on-chain. That predictability is mostly a feature. But it has an edge: anyone who knows exactly when tens of thousands of ETH will hit the market can position ahead of it.

Two protocol changes hit Ethereum eight days apart in late 2025. The gas limit jumped from 45M to 60M on November 25. Then Fulu — Ethereum's PeerDAS upgrade — activated on December 3. Neither was unexpected. What nobody documented is what happened to MEV builder competition in the weeks that followed.

Builder bid density fell 66%. Proposers earned 30–40% less from MEV-boost during December. The market took seven weeks to recover, and when it did, the recovery was abrupt — not gradual. It happened in a single day.

There's a counterintuitive pattern buried in Ethereum's block-building data: the most valuable blocks — the ones where MEV extractors collect the most ETH — consistently contain fewer transactions than ordinary blocks.

Not slightly fewer. Significantly fewer.

A block worth 0.2–1 ETH in MEV carries, on average, 185 transactions. A normal low-MEV block carries 293. That's 108 fewer transactions — a 37% drop from peak — in a block that everyone in the market fought hardest to produce.