The rise of Ethereum has lead to a flourishing decentralized marketplace that has, unfortunately, fallen victim to frontrunning and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) activities, where savvy participants game transaction orderings within a block for profit. One popular solution to address such behavior is Flashbots, a private pool with infrastructure and design goals aimed at eliminating the negative externalities associated with MEV. While Flashbots has established laudable goals to address MEV behavior, no evidence has been provided to show that these goals are achieved in practice. In this paper, we measure the popularity of Flashbots and evaluate if it is meeting its chartered goals. We find that (1) Flashbots miners account for over 99.9% of the hashing power in the Ethereum network, (2) powerful miners are making more than $2\times$ what they were making prior to using Flashbots, while non-miners' slice of the pie has shrunk commensurately, (3) mining is just as centralized as it was prior to Flashbots with more than 90% of Flashbots blocks coming from just two miners, and (4) while more than 80% of MEV extraction in Ethereum is happening through Flashbots, 13.2% is coming from other private pools.
翻译:Eceenum的崛起导致了一个蓬勃发展的分散市场,不幸的是,这个市场已经沦为前期和最大可提取值(MEV)活动的受害者,在这个市场中,受欢迎的参与者在一块利润区内进行游戏交易。解决这种行为的一个流行解决办法是Flashbots,这是一个拥有基础设施和设计目标的私营池塘,目的是消除与MEV有关的负面外部因素。虽然Flashbots已经确立了应对MEV行为值得称道的目标,但没有提供证据表明这些目标在实践中得到了实现。在本文件中,我们测量了Flashbots的受欢迎程度,并评估它是否达到了其特许目标。我们发现(1) Flashbots矿工占Etheem网络中耗尽电力的99.9%以上,(2) 强大的矿工在使用Flashbots之前已经赚到了超过2美元的时间,而非采矿商的馅饼切片却相应萎缩,(3) 采矿与Flashbots之前一样集中,只有超过90 %的Flashbotbotsbots的块块块,仅来自两个矿工矿工企业,(4) 来自Flaflast Virom rotrotrolate 13.2%以上。