Welcome to “The Chopping Block!” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news. This week, Flashbots co-founder Phil Daian joins the show to go deep on what maximal extractable value (MEV) means and how it’s shaping the Ethereum ecosystem.
Show highlights:
- how Phil started working in MEV and why he believes it resembles ‘Alice in Wonderland’
- Phil’s definition of MEV and when he realized this was an actual problem
- how Flashbots was born
- the story of how Vitalik didn’t care about sandwich attacks at the time Uniswap was released
- whether it’s possible to minimize MEV via more competition
- the never-ending debate about whether MEV should be accepted
- why Tarun thinks the concept of fair ordering is against nature
- how Bitcoin uses social norms to solve its weaknesses
- how Google is being called out in court for creating auction to front run its customers
- how Flashbots worked prior to and after Ethereum’s Merge
- why Flashbots complies with OFAC sanctions
- what is the Suave project and how it aims to decentralize Flashbots
- what the future of MEV looks like
Hosts
- Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital
- Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
- Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital
Guest:
Phil Daian, cofounder of Flashbots:
Disclosures
Links
The Block: Flashbots seeks up to $50 million at a billion-dollar valuation
CoinDesk: Opinion: Miners, Front-Running-as-a-Service Is Theft
CNN: DOJ sues Google over its dominance in online advertising market
Unchained: 51% of Ethereum Blocks Are OFAC Censored Given the Sanctions on Tornado Cash, Is Ethereum Censorship Resistant? – Ep. 390
The Cost of Decentralization in 0x and EtherDelta
Previous coverage of Unchained on MEV:
