Phil Daian is a crypto-economic researcher! Phil is the lead author behind the landmark paper, “Flash Boys 2.0,” which introduced and defined the MEV problem in the Ethereum landscape, over 4 years ago. He is the cofounder of FlashBots, which is a research and dev organization with the mission of mitigating the negative externalities of MEV.
Andrew Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, SGX Bull, and visiting researcher at Flashbots, and big believer in cypherpunk values through crypto-economic mechanisms.
------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-suave
Have you ever heard of Flashbots? Flashbots is the silent protector of Ethereum, a shield against the forces of centralization that silently sneak into our cryptosystems and turn them into TradFi. It’s one of the unsung heroes of crypto.
The guests we have on today are from Flashbots, Phil Daian, and Andrew Miller. They believe the biggest centralization threats in crypto still lie ahead. And they’ve got a new platform that’s being built to defend against them. It’s called “Suave”, and we’ve been hearing a lot about it recently - “Solving MEV” - “Decentralizing block building” - but going into this episode, we weren’t sure exactly what it was. We found out during this episode.
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------ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro 8:20 History of Flashbots & MEV 15:35 MEV Boost 19:25 Andrew’s Journey 23:20 What’s at Stake? 25:00 Solving MEV 33:44 What’s Suave? 41:13 Intents 45:25 Suavechain? 54:53 Decentralized Block Building 1:02:27 Privacy of Suave 1:08:02 Suave’s Importance & Goal 1:12:40 L2s 1:15:18 Alt-L1s 1:18:00 MEV Naiveness 1:21:31 Benefits of Suave 1:30:36 Suave Roadmap 1:32:23 Why the World Needs Suave 1:38:25 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES
How to get Started Building on Suave https://collective.flashbots.net/t/suave-wiki/2018
Learn about MEV Crypto’s Existential Threat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOVz7dOrGyY Flashbots Saves Crypto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xex9WVmVfbg
Learn about Blockchain Supply Chains Ethereum’s Hidden Power Structures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQxuPBy8tJg
Learn about Moloch Slaying Moloch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=903tHM4RA9k Why we can’t have nice things? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeQ2_ep0Cg4
------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
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:
Twitter
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:
Why Is Ethereum Trying to Maximize Value From Users? Two Sides Debate
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Phil Daian is a researcher and software engineer and is leading the charge into mapping MEV with the Flashbots Project. Georgios Konstantopoulos and Charlie Noyes are both partners at Paradigm.
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Bankless Podcast #66: MEV Panel Guests: Charlie Noyes, Phil Daian, & Georgios Konstantopolous
In this State of the Nation, we bring on big-brain experts behind projects like Paradigm and Flashbots to explain the complex but critical topic of MEV - commonly known as Miner Extractable Value, but as discussed in this episode, Maximum Extractable Value is a more appropriate descriptor. MEV is arguably the single most important unsolved problem in the crypto space.
In the context of incentives and network security, MEV generally refers to the ability of miners & validators to take advantage of their position as securers of the network. Blocks are verified by single entities, and these block producers have tremendous power when they are the ones adding a particular block to the blockchain. We refer to this instance as ‘God-Mode,’ in which a node has the power to assemble & order transactions at will. The threat here is the potential gaps between what is best for the network and what is best for the node.
As an internal and unbounded threat to blockchains, solving the problems that MEV presents is critical to maintaining proper consensus and ensuring decentralization and permissionless access. We take a deep dive into potential solutions, and the impact of EIP-1559 and Proof-of-Stake on MEV. Dive in to learn why despite the challenges ahead, Charlie says:
“In the absence of certainty, I’m willing to take the optimistic perspective.”
------ Resources:
Phil on Twitter https://twitter.com/phildaian?s=20 Georgios on Twitter https://twitter.com/gakonst?s=20 Charlie on Twitter https://twitter.com/_charlienoyes?s=20 Exploring Ethereum’s Dark Forest with Dan Robinson https://youtu.be/MtpRDqrCfbc Investing in DeFi Paradigms with Charlie Noyes https://youtu.be/dQOhbb5HmLA
----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures
Carole Cadwalladr and Yael Eisenstat are two of the most prominent Facebook critics worldwide. Cadwalladr is the journalist who broke open the Cambridge Analytica story for the Guardian and The Observer. Eisenstat, a former CIA officer, worked on election integrity inside Facebook for six months before quitting and speaking out against the company. The two Facebook critics join Big Technology Podcast to discuss some people’s disenchantment with tech criticism, the role of Facebook’s Oversight Board, and how the company might fix its product.
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Yaël Eisenstat, a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech's Digital Life Initiative and former Elections Integrity Head for Political Ads at Facebook, joins Scott to discuss the online threats to democracy and the damaging role Facebook plays in our elections. Yaël has also served as a CIA officer and White House advisor. Follow her on Twitter, @YaelEisenstat.
Scott opens with his thoughts on TikTok’s powerful algorithm and why he does not think the deal with Oracle will go through.
Algebra of Happiness: There’s no such thing as quality time. There’s just time.
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Sash Rush, of Cornell Tech and Hugging Face, catches us up on all the things happening with Hugging Face and transformers. Last time we had Clem from Hugging Face on the show (episode 35), their transformers library wasn’t even a thing yet. Oh how things have changed! This time Sasha tells us all about Hugging Face’s open source NLP work, gives us an intro to the key components of transformers, and shares his perspective on the future of AI research conferences.
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Featuring:
Sasha Rush – Website, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Giveaway details!! Check this blog post for all the details to win a free copy of Dracula PRO && 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers
Hugging Face
Transformers library
Tokenizers library
NLP (data and evaluation metrics) library
Previous Practical AI episode with Hugging Face
TechCrunch announcement about Hugging Face’s recent fundraising
The annotated transformer
2000+ models in Hugging Face’s model hub
Attention is all you need paper
Mini Conf tools
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
Why is our political discourse so divisive? How much of it is technology's fault? and Who needs to step up and fix it? Tom talks with Yaël Eisenstat, a policy adviser at the Center for Humane Technology about all these questions.
https://www.yaeleisenstat.com/
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with Phil Daian (@phildaian) and Ali Yahya (@ali01)
Whether in corporations, boardrooms, or political elections, voting is something we see in all kinds of social systems... including blockchains. It's the natural human tendency for how to organize decisions, and in distributed systems without centralized middlemen, it's the only clear Schelling point we can come up with.
But too many people design voting mechanisms in distributed systems in isolation -- sometimes naively "porting over" assumptions from the real world or from simple cryptoeconomic models without thinking through the economic adversaries present in a larger, more rational (vs. "honest") game-theoretic system. So how are blockchain systems different from real-world paper and electronic voting systems? How can such systems be gamed, and what are the implications for cryptoeconomic security... as well as the governance of distributed organizations?
This hallway-style episode of the a16z Podcast covers all this and more. Recorded as part of our NYC roadtrip, it features Cornell Tech PhD student and software engineer Phil Daian, who researches applied cryptography and smart contracts -- and who also wrote about "On-chain Vote Buying and the Rise of Dark DAOs" in 2018 (with Tyler Kell, Ian Miers, and his advisor Ari Juels). Daian is joined by a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya (previously a software engineer and machine learning researcher at GoogleX and Google Brain), who also recently presented on crypto as the evolution -- and future -- of trust.
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.
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