Ripple's Acquisition of Crypto-Focused Chartered Trust Company Fortress Trust
NounsDAO on the Brink of Treasury Division Split Amidst 'Rage Quit' Uprising by NFT Holders
Defense Accuses DOJ of Providing 'Inaccurate' Information Regarding Sam Bankman-Fried's Laptop Access
During Ethereum's 92nd Consensus Layer Call, developers talked about ways to fix a problem that could slow down the network's upcoming Merge, which is when Ethereum moves from its current proof-of-work (PoW) protocol to the Beacon Chain proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.
A researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, Alex Stokes, brought up concerns about a possible MEV-boost failure. The vulnerability could change how relay operators talk to each other. Relay operators are middlemen between block builders and validators. So, the orderly way that blocks are added to the blockchain could be messed up.
But Stokes told CoinDesk that this new problem shouldn't change the timetable for the Merge.
How does the MEV-boost work?
MEV-boost is a key part of Ethereum's "maximal extractible value" (MEV). MEV is the money that miners (in a PoW system) and block builders and validators (in a PoS system) get when they add or move transactions within a block.
The MEV-boost is a piece of middleware that is meant to prevent MEV from becoming too centralized. It lets validators request blocks from a network of builders. After the Merge, people who use the network will send block builders their transactions over the blockchain. Then, the MEV-boost feature will gather these blocks and make them available to validators. Validators will choose and put forward to the Ethereum network the blocks that will make the most money.
If the MEV-boost doesn't work right, it will mess up the whole PoS blockchain. Because of a problem with a relay operator, a block would not be released at the right time. Then, a number of blocks from validators running the MEV-boost could be missed. This would happen if the validator didn't propose a block because a relay wasn't able to let validators know when it was being malicious.
Then, the next group of validators would be hacked, and if they proposed a block that fixed the malicious relay, the same problems would keep happening, making it impossible to make blocks indefinitely.
Possible choices
During the call, one of the ideas talked about putting in a circuit breaker. This could be as easy as writing code to tell the validator to turn off automatically if blocks are missed. This would be a risky thing to do, since validators could choose not to propose blocks. There is a reason to do that, and if the person could trick other validators, they could get all of the MEV earnings.
Some other developers also thought that a dashboard from a third party could keep an eye on the relays. The people who made MEV-boost, the Flashbots team, are already working on a way for the public to keep track of MEV-activity. Ben Edgington, who is the lead product owner for Teku at ConsenSys and works on the development of Merge, told CoinDesk that there are a few ways to solve the MEV-boost problem. "All you have to do is pick a good way to do it," he said.
Christine Kim, a research associate at Galaxy Digital who took notes at the meeting, said, "MEV-boost already puts trust in relay operators. Trust in relay operators as a way to earn MEV has always been known, but before Thursday's call, no one knew that a relay operator could cause network downtime in this way.
Stokes told CoinDesk after the call that developers are looking into options like making users wait until the Merge is done before trying to use the builder or adding some kind of circuit breaker. Stokes said that the chances of a MEV-boost failing are very low, but he is working hard to get a plan in place in case it does.
