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Frequently Asked Questions
This world is confusing, but we are on this together 🌈
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MEV is Maximal Extractable Value. It is the profit a block proposer (miner or validator) can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions from the blocks they propose.
Read Maximal Extractable Value in the Ethereum docs.
You should run mev-boost to earn a fair share of the MEV extracted in the blocks you propose. Connecting your consensus client to mev-boost allows you to get full blocks from a network of block builders optimized for MEV extraction. This can increase validator rewards by 75.3%, or give an APR of 12.86% rather than a non-MEV APR of 7.35% from staking eth.
The alternative would be to get blocks from your local execution client, which can only get transactions from the public mempool and is not optimized for MEV extraction. Or to implement your own builder, which is a complicated task and still leaves you with the problem of finding good sources of transactions with high MEV.
Read Why run mev-boost? and MEV in eth2 - an early exploration.
Yes. mev-boost is designed to be used by any validator, no matter the size of its stake.
In Ethereum proof-of-work we had no way to prevent small miners from misbehaving and stealing MEV. Once identified, they could just get a new identity and continue misbehaving. The solution was to make a list of allowed miners that were big enough to be concerned about their reputation. Their profit would be severely affected if they were removed from the allowed list. This resulted in one more incentive for the concentration of mining power in a few organizations.
The most significant change for MEV in Ethereum proof-of-stake is that with mev-boost now validators can be permissionless. The order is reversed: instead of the Flashbots relay sending blocks or bundles of transactions to the miners, now the validators request blocks to the Flashbots relay through mev-boost. The Flashbots relay in turn requests blocks to a network of builders and gives the header of the most profitable one to the validator, while holding the payload in escrow. Once the validator signs the header, the relay publishes the block payload. If at this moment the validator decides to propose a different block, they will have signed two blocks and will be slashed.
Note that this does not mean that the system is fully permissionless and decentralized, yet. The Flashbots relay is still trusted. Read the open research questions and join us exploring possible solutions.