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Technical Details

Foundation​

After formalizing the threat posed by MEV, and creating mev-geth to begin addressing it, Flashbots has collaborated with many people and organizations to build neutral open-source software like mev-boost and mev-share. Our work has prevented the worst effects of MEV, though many critical problems remain.

To read more about what inspires us, and why we are working on SUAVE, we recommend this post.

This section describes how SUAVE works, and provides up-to-date reference material for all the APIs and precompiles SUAVE gives you access to.

SUAVE Plan​

SUAVE is our means of keeping block building decentralized by creating an open marketplace for mechanisms that handle block building and orderflow auctions. Such a marketplace requires its own network. As an open marketplace for mechanisms, SUAVE can also act as a shared sequencing layer for other blockchains, helping them remain resilient to economic forces that encourage centralization and/or specialization over time.

The high level plan is:

  1. Permissionless programmability
    • make it possible to create MEV applications as smart contracts, written in builder solidity
  2. Trust minimization
    • replace trusted third parties (TTPs) with trusted execution environments (TEEs)
  3. Decentralized execution
    • geographically and administratively, using threshold MPC, FHE etc as they become viable

There are many reasons why we think the market will evolve toward many chains sharing a unified sequencing layer which is specifically intended to keep power meaningfully decentralized in each specific chain:

  1. Block builders who only operate on a single domain will find themselves increasingly disadvantaged due to cross-domain MEV.
  2. There are efficiency gains for users from aggregating and clearing their preferences inside the same auction.
  3. The credible neutrality of an open marketplace in which many parties share their views, strategies, and opinions gives SUAVE an information advantage on centralized builders.
  4. Enabling computation on sensitive data (user orderflow) in a permissionless setting is hard. By solving it once, we can amortize the cost across the ecosystem and provide better solutions more cheaply than any individual participant could.
  5. Because of how fundamental transaction sequencing is in blockchains, only another decentralized system can provide the necessary security and credible neutrality.

Building unified infrastructure for expressing diverse values is the best way to give domains control over their own validation guarantees and to ensure smaller domains stay decentralized in the face of centralizing economic forces outside their control.

*Refers to notes​

In this section, you'll find up-to-date and succinct descriptions of each part of SUAVE and the MEVM. Once you're familiar wih the tutorials and how to guides, this section should help you create new and innovative mechanisms of your own on SUAVE.

  1. Builder solidity - what it is and what it offers you.
    1. Worked examples.
  2. Confidential computation - what is is and how to think about it.
    1. New APIs.
  3. Available precompiles - easy reference list of your new super powers.
  4. MEVM - what it is and how it differs from go-ethereum.