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

 

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: