Building the best blocks with mev-boost
Imagine the daily lunch rush at a busy McDonald's. Customers are placing orders, and the staff is working tirelessly to prepare and serve those orders as quickly and efficiently as possible. In a traditional Ethereum network, the process of building and validating blocks is quite similar to the fast-paced environment of a McDonald's restaurant during peak hours.
In this analogy, Ethereum miners are like the burger flippers at McDonald's, who are responsible for building orders (blocks) and ordering them based on transaction fees, similar to how the staff at McDonald's prioritizes orders based on tips and bribes. This traditional approach to building and validating blocks can be inefficient, as it relies on miners to extract value and structure transactions, often leading to delays and increased costs for users.
Enter MEV-Boost, a new solution that aims to improve the efficiency and value extraction of the Ethereum network. With MEV-Boost, the process of building and validating blocks is separated, allowing specialized block builders to focus on extracting value and ordering transactions while validators simply ensure that the blocks are valid and secure.
MEV-Boost offers several key benefits for the Ethereum network, including:
- Increased competition between block builders, resulting in better value extraction and higher revenues for validators.
- The ability for smaller validators to sell block space and participate in the competitive market without needing to build blocks themselves.
- Enhanced security and redundancy, thanks to a more robust system that prevents validators from ignoring or blacklisting transactions.
- A more neutral and flexible infrastructure that is compatible with any Ethereum client and can accommodate various block building approaches.
- A crucial step towards full proposer-builder separation (PBS) within the Ethereum protocol, leading to greater decentralization and censorship resistance.
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