Bankless - 198 - SUAVE Explained with Phil Daian & Andrew Miller

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

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 year...s 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.  ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  👾GMX | V2 IS NOW LIVE  https://bankless.cc/GMX  💲 USDV | NATIVE OMNICHAIN STABLECOIN https://bankless.cc/usdv   ------ 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 ⁠ 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:07 Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Bankless Nation, have you guys ever heard of FlashBots? If not, you certainly should have. FlashBots is the silent protector of Ethereum. It's a shield against the forces of centralization that silently sneak into our crypto systems and turn them more into banking systems, more like TradFi. And we think FlashBots is one of the unsung heroes of crypto.
Starting point is 00:00:37 The guests we have on today are from FlashBots. Phil Diane is a co-founder. Andrew Miller is also a researcher at FlashBots. And they believe the biggest threats to centralization in crypto still lie ahead. And they've got a new platform that's being built to defend against it. Maybe their most ambitious platform yet. It's called Suav. And David and I have been hearing a lot about it recently in the context of this is how we solve MEV and decentralized block building and things like this. But honestly, going to this episode, we weren't exactly sure what Suav was. So we find out during this episode. This is us open source live streaming or exploration of this MEV technology called Swaf.
Starting point is 00:01:14 A few things we talk about. Number one, the FlashBots doomer thesis, why crypto is doomed in a world without Swaf or something like it. Number two, why crypto needs Swaf, what it actually is, how it works, and what the wins are for the various stakeholders. And then finally, number three, and this was maybe a personal favorite part of the episode for me, why the rest of the world needs Swaf. not just crypto. David, why was this episode significant to you?
Starting point is 00:01:41 First, this episode requires a bunch of prerequisite knowledge. So if you go and listen to this episode and you don't know what MEV is or searchers or block builders or proposer builder separation, you'll actually kind of still be able to catch a vibe. If you don't know what these things are, there are historical episodes that we've produced with Phil and with others in the MEV researcher space. so you can kind of catch up to the frontier of MEV, which is where we are in this episode, the frontier of the arc of what is this progression of understanding and harnessing MEV. And that is more or less synonymous with the arc of FlashBots and also the arc of Phil Dian, one of the two guests here.
Starting point is 00:02:22 There's this research arc of first identifying MEV, then figuring out what to do about it. And there's been slow incremental progress in actually harnessing the power that is MEV. and making sure that it doesn't corrupt and destabilize our systems. Now we have arrived at this new frontier of Suav, which is an evolution beyond what was this most previous frontier, which was MEV Boost, also produced by FlashBuzz. One of the questions I asked Phil is, is this the end? Is this the conclusion of MEV research?
Starting point is 00:02:55 Is this the final meta? And his answer was like, perhaps it is. So I thought that was pretty interesting. There's one thing that we will define going into this episode, something that we haven't talked about on bankless before, and that is SGX. SGX is a part of a broader term called trusted execution environments. SGX specifically is software guard extensions, which is a product out of Intel. It's a computational security technology. It creates an isolated and protective enclave inside of Intel processors that allows for verifiable computation to occur. So SJX encrypts data within enclaves to prevent unauthorized access and ensures code integrity by only allowing authorized code to execute within it. It's basically a way to have trustless computation from your own computer so that even you, the person running the computation, cannot tamper with it. And also, you can prove that you haven't tampered with it to the rest of the world. It's a pretty cool corner of innovation that's going on in parallel
Starting point is 00:03:52 to crypto. That's highly conducive to some of the goals that we have in crypto. And it's also a component that is pretty critical to suave. So you'll hear Andrew. talk about SGX. So I just wanted to define those terms. All right, guys, let's get right to the conversation with Phil and Andrew. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange. That's Cracken. If you don't have an account, go set one up right now. Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us to see what crypto can be.
Starting point is 00:04:30 Human history is a story of progress. It's part of us, hardwired. We're designed to seek change everywhere, to improve, to strive. And if anything can be improved, why not finance? Crypto is a financial system designed with the modern world in mind, instant, permissionless, and 24-7.
Starting point is 00:04:47 It's not perfect, and nothing ever will be perfect. But crypto is a world-changing technology at a time when the world needs it the most. That's the Cracken Mission, to accelerate the global adoption of cryptocurrency, so that you and the rest of the world can achieve financial freedom and inclusion. Head on over to crackin.com slash bankless to see what crypto can be. Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss.
Starting point is 00:05:07 Cryptocurrency services are provided to U.S. and U.S. territory customers by Payward Ventures Eek. PVI doing business as Cracken. Metamask Portfolio is your one-stop shop to navigate the world of Defi. And now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore. With competitive rates and convenient routes, MetaMasq Portfolio's bridge feature lets you easily move your tokens from chain to chain, using popular layer one and layer two networks, and all you have to do is select the network you want to bridge from and where you want your tokens to go. From there, Metamask vets and curates the different bridging
Starting point is 00:05:35 platforms to find the most decentralized, accessible, and reliable bridges for you. To tap into the hottest opportunities in crypto, you need to be able to plug into a variety of networks, and nobody makes that easier than Metamask portfolio. Instead of searching endlessly through the world of bridge options, click the bridge button on your Metamask extension or head over to metamask.io slash portfolio to get started. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions. Arbitrum has the leading defy ecosystem, strong infrastructure options, flourishing NFTs, and is quickly becoming the Web3 gaming hub.
Starting point is 00:06:13 Explore the ecosystem at portal.arbitrum.com. Are you looking to permissionlessly launch your own Arbitrum orbit chain? Arbitrum orbit allows anyone to utilize Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own orbit chain, giving you access to interoperable, customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, an enterprise, or a user, Arbitrum orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be, secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Visit arbitram.io and get your journey started in one of the largest
Starting point is 00:06:47 Ethereum communities. Bankless Nation, I would love to introduce you to Phil Diane, a crypto-economic researcher, Phil is the lead author behind the landmark paper Flash Boys 2.0, where he introduced and defined the MEV problem in the Ethereum landscape over four years ago. He introduced MEV. That's kind of a big deal. He's also the co-founder of FlashBots, which is a research and dev organization with a mission of mitigating the negative externalities of MEV. Phil, welcome back to Bankless. Thank you so much for having you. And new to Bankless, we have Andrew Miller, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, SGX Bull, and visiting researcher at FlashBoss,
Starting point is 00:07:26 and also a big believer in cypherpunk values through crypto economic mechanisms. Andrew, welcome to bankless. Hey, great to be here. So there's this thing going around in the crypto world called suave. If anyone who's paying attention to MEV knows this thing that is suave,
Starting point is 00:07:41 suave to me is this confusing concentration of a bunch of nebulous ideas all instantiated into one single place. So here on this episode today, we're going to try and parse out exactly what is Swave, what Swab wants to bring to crypto, and also what Swab wants to bring to the world. Phil, Andrew, you guys think that we can get that done this episode?
Starting point is 00:08:03 Let's do it. Easy. So I think in order to really understand Swave, we actually kind of have to go back in time and kind of run through the idea maze that I think is FlashBots. FlashBots has this crazy, awesome arc to it. And it's been one of the cooler stories
Starting point is 00:08:17 that I've been following since my early days in crypto. And so, Phil, I think in order to really justify why the world needs swab, why we need to bring Swab into existence. We actually kind of have to run through the history of FlashBass and the history of MEV in order to showcase the decisions that were made that will ultimately bring us to Swab. So I'm wondering if you could speed run us through the history of MEV and FlashBots. Yeah, so I think my particular journey through MEV, everyone has their own, took many, many different directions. But the TLDR is about four or five years ago. I noticed that there was kind of a common problem that was coming up
Starting point is 00:08:50 in different things I was researching. At the time, I was a PhD student thinking about the question of what does it mean for a smart contract or a blockchain to be secure? What is different about securing these systems than securing things we've seen before in maybe traditional software? And this problem kept coming up that there was essentially this breakage in the abstraction that people kind of held canon, which was of the blockchain as a bulletin board, kind of secured by these rational actors. And actually, if people were purely rational actors, there were were many ways in which properties people took for granted about this blockchain or bulletin board as they were thinking about it, this public channel kind of breakdown, potentially leading to the
Starting point is 00:09:31 collapse of the entire system. So as I started investigating this more and more, I was kind of more and more convinced that like this is what the math says and this is the inevitable outcome of what we're building. And Flash Boys 2.0 was kind of my attempt to summarize all of my knowledge and write a position paper to kind of get people in the community thinking more seriously because I think there are a lot of deep questions here about balance of power inside the system, about robustness, censorship resistance, regulations, et cetera, et cetera, that I thought were like super understudied. So this was me and my co-authors attempt to kind of put a flag in the ground and say, look, this is not just a theoretical issue. There's huge consequences and here's some numbers to show you how important it was. I think once people are
Starting point is 00:10:17 aware of the problem. The next question is, what do we actually do about it? How do we solve this? How do we fulfill the ideals of crypto? I think for me, decentralization is super important. I'm a decentralization maxi. Hopefully that will come out in this episode. And I think for me, I saw M.EV and the concentration of power through MEV as kind of the way decentralization dies in some ways. And I think for me, humanity at least deserved a chance to explore and try to integrate these decentralized approaches into various places where today we have trust kind of to fulfill what we were talking about earlier, about the kind of original ideals that bring, for example, Andrew here of this movement. So I think decentralization is super important. And to me,
Starting point is 00:11:02 the question is, how do we get there from here? I think since then there have been a number of steps. The founding of Flashbots is one of them. A number of products we've released to kind of try to nudge the MEV ecosystem into what we think is a direction that thinks about these problems and handles them as kind of first class priorities. And yeah, happy to talk about any of the steps on that journey, but I think Swab is the next one. I'm wondering, Phil, if you could kind of describe the problem that you saw that people at the time didn't. So people thinking about blockchain as a bulletin board, and you're seeing it in a different way. And you are a decentralization. Maxi, it's self-ascribed. So, you know, I'm taking that to me. You saw the decentralized properties
Starting point is 00:11:43 of the system under threat from this particular class of problems. Can you describe the problem? Like, what is the problem of MEV? And maybe the easiest way to understand for a crypto-native, for a crypto-listener, what is the class of problems that you saw then and you're still on a quest to solve? Well, I think the fundamental problem is that what blockchains try to and need to do for them to work is to come up with an order of events of transactions that they're processing and kind of communicate to everyone that this is the order that we all accept for these events or these transactions. I think people hadn't maybe taken into account how much discretionary power there is in the mechanism that actually comes up with this order. So in terms of reordering
Starting point is 00:12:27 transactions or inserting your own transactions or censoring transactions, These are all options that essentially the infrastructure providers of these networks have the option to do from a technical perspective. And there's nothing in the economics that prohibits them from doing these things. But they're very much not the expected behavior. And they lead to this very complicated problem of, okay, if I'm one of these infrastructure providers, what is the most profitable thing I can do in the system? The core problem there is this creates basically an asymmetry. So people who are more sophisticated in being able to leverage these powers, being able to reorder transactions to insert their own and to censor have an advantage in the system over ones who don't because they get paid more per action, basically.
Starting point is 00:13:11 And if you're a game theorist, what that means is when you play the game many times, basically these are the set that will play the game because they're the ones that are profiting more than the other ones. They can afford to drive the other players essentially out of the system. If you look at the act of actually building a block and what it entails when it comes to most of these transactions being Dex transactions, being financial transactions, the players and the entities that have the most sophistication in actually maximizing their own revenue against this kind of optimization problem of how do I actually process these transactions? How do I build a block? The players that have an advantage in that game are essentially hedge funds, proprietary traders and people who have maybe other reasons to be traded. on the blockchain other than purely providing infrastructure, things like arbitrage. And so my fear was essentially that our system was enshrining a concentration of power on the infrastructure level to these players, essentially, the more they could kind of play these games
Starting point is 00:14:11 and do so in a way that was allowed, essentially, that was more sophisticated than other parties. So I think that's one problem. And it could potentially, at least at the time, one of the big concerns was you can concentrate the validator set of Eat This Way, where if you're doing a proof of stake analysis, this was before we moved to proof of stake, you're relying on having many parties with many incentives to kind of come to this robust consensus. If those incentives aren't as clear or clean as what you're putting on paper, then your consensus maybe won't actually come to fruition. So that's kind of how the system could ultimately break as a result. One of the reasons why I think many people who are in crypto for the tech come to crypto is they see the equitable foundations on which these platforms like Ethereum like Bitcoin provide to the world.
Starting point is 00:15:00 I think Phil, what you are identified in MEV is like, oh, we do have this equitable foundation, but MEV can tilt power into the balance of parties that already have it, right? People that are already well capitalized to market make, right? Like technical MEV bot coders who have this power and they can capture that value. and that can be expressed in an increasing concentration of each stake at a faster rate than non-technical people. And so being a decentralization maxi, I think this is perhaps like one of the arcs of FlashBots, is like how do we preserve the equitable foundations of these platforms? One of the big flagship products out of FlashBots was this thing called MEV Boost. Can you talk about MEV Boost and how it produces and helps maintain the equitable foundations of Ethereum?
Starting point is 00:15:42 Yeah, so MEV Boost came out of the line of research called PBS or proposed. or builder separation, highly recommend reading up on that if you're not familiar with it. This was, you know, many people's kind of memes spearheaded mainly by Vitalik, I would say, but with many kind of contributors in the community. And this is the idea of basically separating this sophisticated activity of optimizing blocks from the activity of proposing blocks on the network. So the actual proof of stake protocol that was being designed. The reason for this was we had a system called Mevgeth, which worked on proof of work. It was a very different auction. And all we were trying to do there is basically show people, one, ordering matters. And two, in a permissionless
Starting point is 00:16:26 auction for ordering, you basically get more value for all parties. If that auction is permissionless and competitive, then you do in a proprietary or like side deal style auction. When proof of stake came, the question was, okay, what's different here? I think one big thing was the desire to allow solo stakers, so parties that were not as sophisticated. to participate. And Mev Boost and PBS was basically a way to try to contain the specialization to this layer and this role that was called the builder that would essentially make these complex trade-off decisions in an auction that was competitive. The idea being that if you were a validator, even if you were not sophisticated and you were just proposing blocks and validating
Starting point is 00:17:06 Ethereum, you could still make as much money as the sophisticated parties by essentially receiving bids from those parties for your action space. And if you make that competitive, it's kind of better for the system than having it be side deals or opaque. So that was kind of the background with Mev Boost. Of course, there's problems with it. A key among them is it relies on centralized trusted parties to achieve a lot of its guarantees. And I think that's really what we're trying to move away from in the next phase. The relays, right, being one of those trusted parties, and I believe it's what 90 to 95% of validators you're now using Mev Boost at this point in time. So you guys have been pretty effective with this.
Starting point is 00:17:47 And one of my favorite part to this story, Phil, is not only were you in the FlashBots team responsible for making the entire crypto community and the crypto industry aware of the power of block ordering, which we were previously unaware, is you guys actually put together a solution. So it's kind of rare to have like somebody surface the problem and then also architect the solution to that problem. And whenever that happens, it's just a fantastic thing. Before we get to swab, because I think we're now almost caught up in history, where we are right now, we've got this thing called MEV boost. It's helping to corral and mitigate some of the MEV in all sorts of ways. I just want to bring Andrew into this conversation. So the problem set that Phil teed up, Andrew, what about that world is appealing to you?
Starting point is 00:18:31 Like, how did you find yourself being sucked into the rabbit hole that is solving these weird MEV crypto coordination problems because you're an associate professor, aren't you, Andrew? Yeah, that's right. Tell me about that journey. Well, I come from this from a different perspective starting from privacy technologies. I've kind of spent the most time doing research on, I mean, the whole stack of things like zero knowledge proofs and multi-party computation and so on, and I've spent the most time working with Zcash.
Starting point is 00:18:57 And I mean, to me, my perception of MEV was just it's something that has nothing to do with privacy. It's something that's very financial and that Phil has it under control. So it's just something that I was aware of kind of during the past, you know, several years, but not on, you know, hadn't piqued my interest so much because I didn't see that, you know, that connection to it. But the path that I've been going down has been basically realizing kind of where the limits of zero knowledge proofs are and kind of making this kind of observation that most of the interesting applications have some kind of shared private state that's needed. And so you really can't just do everything with zero knowledge proofs. You have to use one of these kind of alternative techniques. And so I spent the most time working in multi-party computation and entrusted hardware enclaves like SGX kind of recently. I mean, for my perspective, like, we wrote this research paper called Echiden in 2018, and that kind of became the basis for Oasis later, and it basically has the same design, you know, structure as secret network, which then followed that really closely, basically in terms
Starting point is 00:19:55 of identifying, what are the differences between what we wrote in the Echiden paper and what they actually implemented. That went down this kind of interesting rabbit hole on of its own, but a really relevant one of what it takes to build, you know, a credibly decentralized system that relies on trusted hardware for its shared private state. And so that all kind of came together at the moment that I heard about the suave proposal and suddenly a whole bunch of things kind of click. So first of all, the need for privacy, not in the long-term user privacy, like protect dissidents, user privacy view for MEV. There's this very obvious but short-term kind of privacy needs. So you care about pre-trade privacy. And then that's actually really important, not just for user's own safety,
Starting point is 00:20:33 The big challenge in working in privacy tech is that users won't pay for privacy. They don't understand it very well. So it's very challenging to get on adoption of good privacy technology. And so this is a setting where you really need the privacy. It's really well motivated. It's well motivated in a way that you can see and understand the consequences of it a lot better. And I just became clear that this was going to be a really great way of approaching that problem, combining these two technologies.
Starting point is 00:20:58 And then it fits the kind of other goal that I've had, which is to basically, you know, elevate the quality, of systems built using trusted hardware enclaves. So I'm not an SGX bull per se, but I do think this is technology that's kind of misunderstood and underrated and, you know, gets a negative sentiment for misunderstandings as much as for, you know, real reasons that deserve it. And so on. So, I've to me, is an opportunity to basically, you know, do this the right way for a perfect problem, you know, while everyone's watching and the incentives to get it right are really clear. And, yeah, that's my path to it.
Starting point is 00:21:27 So, Andrew, safe to say, Phil doesn't have it all figured out with respect to M.V. he needs some help, particularly on the privacy side. He needs a team around him to actually help him achieve some of these objectives. Yeah, that's the case. You can't just like stare at Phil and wait for the entire problem to be solved. That's what I've been doing. It's worked for me so far. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:46 I'm stunned that Amoev is still an open problem at all, but now we're kind of staring at both you guys. And I'm wondering, Andrew, if you share this intuition that Phil stated earlier that, you know, if we don't solve the MEP problem, right, you're talking about crypto values and kind of libertarian values. identifying with a cypherpunk manifesto. But if we don't solve this problem, it could potentially lead to the collapse of the entire system.
Starting point is 00:22:09 Do you think that's what's at stake here? Do you share that intuition? Yeah, I mean, I've heard this described as the FlashBots Doomer thesis. I find it fairly compelling. I think, I mean, all credit to Phil for, you know, like you said, you know, accurately prophesizing a problem just in time to see, you know, actually take place and then be able to, you know, kind of identify paths towards solutions of it.
Starting point is 00:22:27 You know, that doesn't come around so often. So that's like a really cool thing to foresee. and specifically foreseeing when things will become huge trends towards decentralization. I think that's a really great thing to try to identify and then try to mitigate. So, I mean, whether it leads to just a suboptimal outcome where there's more centralization than needed, or whether it, you know, ends the entire experiment, whether you take the soft tumor thesis or the full-on one, it's a really important and worthwhile goal. So I do think that these are areas where auctions in general, all of these things that are like order flow auctions,
Starting point is 00:22:57 all sorts of components in the MEV supply chain, they implicitly. rely on privacy that comes right now only through the mechanism of just trust, and that is fundamentally a centralizing force. And so trying to build something that avoids that is, yeah, hugely important. We've been setting the stage, what I think is going to be a good place to bring up Swab here. We have the history of flashbots and MEV boost and the mechanism design that data has created to contain some of the MEV. Then, Andrew, we're bringing in some privacy and some further mechanism design tools to add into the mix of what it takes to fully solve this problem. Phil, I want to give you my take about like this arc that is flashbots
Starting point is 00:23:37 and the fill arc and really just the harnessing of MEV arc where, you know, it starts with identifying it with the Flash Boy's 2.0 paper. Then Mev Boost starts to actually contain it, like puts a wrapper around it and it pushes it away from the centralizing forces, the big, you know, jump cryptos of the world, the big market makers of the world, and it actually harnesses it and pushes it into ETH staking, actually, which is a more distributed set of people. But it's actually not doing the thing that I think Suav wants to do, which is nipping it in the bud in the first place. And I think that's kind of the big golden solution that we are looking for, that FlashBots is looking for, is it's great that we were able to harness MEV through Mev Boost, and instead
Starting point is 00:24:24 of giving it to just one centralized, very expert, very well capitalized parties that are, you know, like MEV bots and market makers, instead pushing it towards a very wide distributed set of people in the Eath holders, the East Dakers. That's an improvement, but it's still not what is the golden standard, which is just like not having MEPV extraction at all. And I think that is where this arc is pointing towards and what Swab is trying to do. That's my understanding. How does that vibe with you? I mean, I think the distinction between solving and harnessing MEP is actually very small. I think ultimately, MEP is basically about what is the power distribution in your system, how is information propagated, and who profits off that.
Starting point is 00:25:06 I think you can always very easily solve it through centralization, essentially. Like, this is actually what when I first, even years before Flashboy's 2.0, when I first discovered this in the context of Dex design, this was before Uniswap launched on chain back in the Ether Delta days, when Uniswap asked me, like, hey, what do you think of this design? I was like, well, you should really have, like, a centralized order book that you all run in a permissioned way and, like, don't cheat, because otherwise there's no protection, you know? So I think there are solutions right now, but there are also limitations to those solutions. It's this kind of, like, devilish problem where, like, because it's about power balance and arbitrage and these complex
Starting point is 00:25:46 information asymmetries, it's not clear we, like, even know how to, like, solve it or what that means. Like there may be one structure that one set of people consider a solution because it has less of like some type of toxicity that they subscribe to that another set of people totally don't even want to use because they consider it so unfair. I think this is like the trillion dollar, you know, like divide basically. So that's all to kind of troll you into saying like I get the impulse to solve MEV. But to me, the only solution is to like have a fair, decentralized, permissionless way to harness it. And you want to, yes, be thoughtful, basically not to be needlessly sending too much to the validators or sending too much to jump crypto or anything like
Starting point is 00:26:29 that in your market structure. But yeah, it's a very complex problem with many knobs. I think what Swab is trying to do is to add decentralization to as many of those systems as possible, just provide a new trade-off point that's more decentralized from an infrastructure point of view. And to me, this is like both the solution and the minimization of MEV, because then users will be able to harness it because they have a permissionless competitive environment. They don't have to be kind of at the power mercy of whoever controls the pipes the way they are in TradFi, for example. So as we get into what is suave and we ask that question, I'm not going to ask it yet. I just want to set this up with one other question, which is what outstanding MEV problems still exist that suave is really teed up to solve? give us the problem set here. Andrew said earlier, oh, I think Phil's got the MEV problem. It turns out he does and there's more work to be done. What is that work? Yeah, so I absolutely don't have the MEV problem, which is actually why I wrote the paper. Like for two or three years before the paper, I tried to solve it by myself and with a few collaborators on a whiteboards.
Starting point is 00:27:35 And I went down all sorts of different directions, including social choice theory, fair ordering, auction theory, block space futures. these are all like papers that I had half of and then decided it didn't work and like we threw it out. So I don't actually know the solution. I think the whole, you know, at least for me, the like crafting of Flash Boys 2.0 was how to make the problem simple enough that people are convinced that they can just solve it. But actually it's like devilishly difficult. It touches on things in like law, economics, market microstructure, you know, protocol politics in terms of distribution to holders, validators, etc. consensus research, distributed system security, you know, economic mechanism design using settings that we haven't even seen yet in academia in terms of complexity. So there's many, many verticals.
Starting point is 00:28:24 I think every person who kind of approaches this easy problem finds some path to start walking and it's a journey. And to me, that's like one of the most interesting things because every person has a different set of unsolved problems. I'm curious, Andrew, to hear yours also. I think, at least for me, my biggest thing that keeps me up at night is like, can we come up with a power distribution that doesn't collapse to centralization? Can we maintain permissionlessness? What are the best economic mechanisms to kind of encourage that competitiveness and distribution versus like, you know, more predatory rent extraction or zero-sum games or sniping or something more socially wasteful? So that to me is the big question. But we don't know how to do that in
Starting point is 00:29:06 tradfi. So I don't know, it's hard to do in crypto also. Yeah, since you asked, I mean, so much of that kind of space about what you can do with suave or any system connect with, you know, open problems in market structure. That's all, I think open even in the tradfai world. And so, yeah, and I don't have so much insight on kind of those. I mean, I have a kind of simplified model of, you know, what a sufficient number of problems are in MEV for which there's already, like, not a good solution, you know, except for something like SWAS. So to me, it's like, you can already see kind of the critical effects of like sandwich attacks and lost arbitrage opportunities, even in just like a little toy model with like a couple of AMMs and some kind of fragmentation of
Starting point is 00:29:46 liquidity. Suddenly then the ordering matters and then, you know, all the relevant phenomena kind of show up. So to me, I imagine the problem that is still open, but that suave is addressing in the simplest form of this problem before getting to, you know, all the other more open-ended ones, but it was really just, you know, how to do a, you know, credibly decentralized job of, of applying some sort of sound auction mechanism to all of these bids coming in from users. It's the same thing as finding, you know, an ordering for trades against an AMM. And, you know, the ways to do that, that give any sort of, you know, guarantee of quality for users or satisfy any sort of, you know, fairness objective that you could come up with.
Starting point is 00:30:25 Pretty much they all rely on privacy in some way. And so without suave, there isn't a good alternative way of addressing all of those and especially not in a generalizable way. And to me, one of the things that clarifies the scope of suave quite a lot is to say, and now actually I didn't know that story the way that Phil put it, but kind of clarifies a lot. So after, you know, banging your head against the wall trying to solve MEPV through doing the mechanism design yourself, different perspective is to say, you know, this is going to be a game that continues through meta-game phases and the meta-shifts over time. There isn't going to be one mechanism that wins them all.
Starting point is 00:30:57 So it's necessary to come up with more of a platform view. So a platform for building M-EV-relevant mechanisms. All the interesting ones are going to need privacy. So that's kind of, you know, the key feature, credible, you know, execution accuracy as well. So then those are kind of the things that the platform has to provide. Yeah, to me, that's, you know, basically what frames the problem that suave solves. I think we've done a pretty good job actually defining the spirit of suave and the goals of suave, the contours of suave. But I think it's about time now to actually approach this conversation head on.
Starting point is 00:31:31 So, Phil, what's suave? Suave. Swave is the single unifying auction for value expression. So it's a platform. It's a set of tools and also systems that are deployed, including distributed systems, including nodes and things like that, to basically allow you to write applications that have several properties. Number one, their privacy enabled in a very decentralized way. Number two, they're able to be distributed across like different infrastructure providers and different node operators essentially. And number three, that there is some credibility to these computations. So, like, you want your computation to be up. You want to often know that it's censorship resistant and you have, like, a robust channel to express your messages and things like that. So it's basically a platform for building these apps.
Starting point is 00:32:21 The first set of which that we're focusing on will basically be MEV time applications. So apps that run while a block is being created on Ethereum in, like, the 15 seconds between protocol making a decision. So it's kind of a tailored set of privacy and infrastructure solutions to build those apps. Okay, so it is a platform and a set of tools for solving MEV problems in its most generalized form. Is that correct? Yeah, you could also use it to possibly solve problems outside of MEV, although when you get to the edges, there's a question of, is this MEV or not? Because it depends how you define like the world and things like that. So for example, ad auctions is another one. I'd say in the most general,
Starting point is 00:33:02 is like it's a platform for building apps that require decentralized coordination. And maybe without suave, we only know how to build these in a centralized trust model. And where trust is very important. So high profile auctions that are often manipulated could be one example. Maybe you consider that MEV. Maybe you don't, depending on whether you take like a blockchain purist view of MEV or not. So would MEV boost be an example of an app on top of SWAF or is MEV boost something separate? Yeah, I mean, I think the MEV boost, it can interact with SWAP in many ways. So certainly you could build like a credible MEV boost validator on SWOV where the validator essentially commits to taking the highest bid in MEV boost. You can also build various components. So MEV Boost itself is like
Starting point is 00:33:48 an overarching name for the protocol, but there's many subcomponents and any of those components can be built on SWOV. One big example is the relay in MEV boost. Right now it's responsible for two things, making sure blocks that go to a validator are accurate and valid, and they're not spamming the validator and basically ensuring payments slash protecting the validator from getting slashed and also providing privacy to the searchers from malicious validators that may want to see the contents early. So these modules, you could just write as essentially apps ensov, where instead of having this relay that validates your blocks and attests to the payment and maintains the privacy, this is done by many notes that are running.
Starting point is 00:34:28 all over the world in a joint computation. And in that way, you have a relay that doesn't really look like a classic centralized relay. But you could also do this for the builder, which is another component in MED boost. Distributed decentralized builder is one of our main projects. And you can also do it for the validator interface. I think we're about to enter this phase in this conversation where it's a bunch of blind men feeling the elephant. And we're like, is suave like this?
Starting point is 00:34:52 Is suave like that? So I'll throw this next one at you. Swave kind of feels like a mempool of sorts. where like currently what do I do, I write my unoswap trade and I broadcast it everywhere and I just crossed my fingers that I didn't get bitten by some MEV bought too badly, but I probably did. Instead, I could submit a transaction to suave and that would be a pre-memmpool layer. Instead of going to the broad mempool, I would just submit it to suave. And there's some amount of like protections in the order of operations that go in with my transaction that preserve my capital the best.
Starting point is 00:35:28 I kind of perceive as like a mempool, an alternative mempool with user protections. How is that definition standing up? Yeah, I want to hear also Andrew's take on what Suav is because he's a professor and he's more eloquent than I am in this kind of stuff. But I think, yes, that is one way you could use Swave. So, like, going back to Swave being a platform, I think an encrypted Mempool is certainly one set of apps we want to build and, like, encourage on Swave. Specifically, I think the winners in the privacy preserving mempool space are ones that, like,
Starting point is 00:35:57 do handle the MEV intelligently and let the user control basically the value of their information, but also leverage it in that block production process to get the best price, to get the best outcomes, to get the best execution for that trade. I think you really need privacy to do a lot of these things. So yeah, I think that is for sure one of the apps that we will build on suave is like a programmably encrypted mempool. And we also encourage others to kind of reach out and collaborate there. Andrew, how do you define suave? Let me first just answer the last question about the definition as a mempool. I guess I'm trying to come up with things that Suav can do that aren't captured by having a protected mempool in that case.
Starting point is 00:36:38 So it's definitely at least able to do an encrypted mempool. That's like a motivating application. But other things that make sense that don't fit into that are being able to generate transactions that were generated from running a function on private bids that had been submitted. So that's not captured in just a mempool that can only reorder transactions, you know, privately without getting to see them. So that's a little bit more anything that involves like persistent private state also. Like if you have the value of the bid is sort of moving over time according to a pre-programmed rule, you know, that's something that only kind of shows up over, you know, as time goes on, as multiple blocks go on maybe.
Starting point is 00:37:13 So that's also not necessarily just captured in, you know, a private mempool. But otherwise, yeah, that's a really good analogy for what it does. And then to give an answer as to, you know, what is suave to me? So my simplistic way of thinking of it, suave is a layer two blockchain. It runs smart contracts. The smart contracts offer credible computation and privacy because they run in trusted hardware enclaves. And then the smart contract environment is called mevum. So it's EVM except modified with pre-compiles that are helpful for the task of building blocks and other mev time applications.
Starting point is 00:37:49 Okay, so there's computation that can run on top of suave. So not only is a suave a place for you to deposit transactions into, but it's a place where people can run computations on top of those transactions as well. Yeah, that's necessary for most of the interesting applications, like complex auctions to work. So we've recently been exploring the world of like intents, right, on bankless. And kind of the way that I understand one of the power of intents is that intents can be matched prior to settlement. And in a more efficient way where less people are using gas, there's less slippage. And to me, Swap is perhaps like a meeting place with the necessary computation to understand the optimization of matching, where all these intense and also just vanilla Ethereum transactions and other types of transactions can all kind of be canceled out against each other before some final output is produced.
Starting point is 00:38:43 And that is an optimization that can reduce MEV, does reduce gas, and also I think just makes a much more overall dense transaction bundles. that will perhaps one day at one moment be uploaded into some block and embedded into Ethereum. Am I on target here? Sounds right to me. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I think that's correct. I think one of the underappreciated factors is like where does MEV actually come from?
Starting point is 00:39:07 One place it comes from is conflict. So fundamentally, like, I want to include my transaction. That's worth money for me. You don't want me to include my transaction because it gives you a worse price. I want to win this ARB. You want to win this ARB. there are ultimately preferences that the world has and all of these actors in the system. And as great as it would be for everyone to get their number one choice on everything,
Starting point is 00:39:31 that's not how the world or the blockchain works. I think anyone who's used the blockchain kind of knows that. So then the question is, how do we coordinate like an actually useful outcome that balances all of these different preferences and resolves these conflicts in like a sane way? And unfortunately, the only answer we've seen in the past in crypto is add centralization. So I think what Suav is trying to do is provide a way to do this without centralization. One way to view intense in that model is it's people just expressing their preferences. And now the actual outcome of how do these preferences get matched against each other, turn into
Starting point is 00:40:06 transactions, turn into a block, that basically involves conflict resolution and making choices, basically, in conflicting preferences. So I think even in many intense systems, we've seen like one of two things, either you do this in public and you can use a lot of the tools that we have on like vanilla blockchains. I think the limitations there essentially are that you create MEV from the public nature of these intents and you create a whole separate game on extracting value from these public intents. Or you can use some sort of privacy solution to try to match these in secret or somehow internalize the value of this privacy.
Starting point is 00:40:43 But there's no technically perfect private solution. So what can you do? You can have a centralized server. You can have a key and you can sign with the key. possibly with some staking on top, or you can have a committee of keys. And so suave, I guess, is intended to add one option to, like, how do you match these intents? What is the most efficient way to both maintain and, like, value this privacy, but also get the execution you want?
Starting point is 00:41:06 I take issue with the notion of matching intents. I basically think it's, you know, not sufficient to kind of understand what's going on. So, I mean, intents kind of have two components. I mean, I'm on the intents or kind of glorified limit order side, so that terminology is, you know, the simplest. but there's two parts, right? A limit order has your reserve price. And like an auction terms, that's like the bottom line deal that you would accept, like the worst possible deal that's to like break even or better for you. And you could match two people's intense. If their limit orders,
Starting point is 00:41:33 you know, are compatible, you match them, but you have to do something with the spread. And people want execution quality, which is no one wants just their worst possible price that they'd accept. They want and usually can achieve something better. And so, you know, you can specify your kind of bound condition and enforce that, you know, on chain. Like my intent will not be applied at all. None of my assets will move unless at least my reserve price is met. But you usually want some kind of, you know, execution quality guarantee as well. And so to do that is when privacy ends up being, you know, much more useful and important. Okay. So we're beginning to get the shape of the elephant here, right? But just like we're still feeling it around. So we've got this private
Starting point is 00:42:09 mempool that is maybe programmable. Phil, I've heard you say elsewhere, that is maybe M-EV-aware. And it's not inside a specific blockchain. So it's like a pre-MM-Pool. It's outside of Ethereum. It's outside of all the existing blockchains. And it's where intents can meet. It's where transactions can meet. It's where all sorts of things can meet. And we've got this set of tools within Swab that is able to create apps. And I guess maybe this sort of mempool type of apparatus is an app. Andrew used a couple terms there. One, you used the term blockchain, the B word, to describe this thing. And I want to probe into that because people have a mental model for what a blockchain is. It's not quite what you described with Swab, but maybe it is in some ways. I want to do the takes and puts of that. And then you also
Starting point is 00:42:56 called it a layer two, which implies there would be some sort of bridge to maybe Ethereum or something else, at least when you were describing it. So, Andrew, can you talk about that? What about this word blockchain? Would you describe Swav as a blockchain or is it something else? And also, layer two, how does that, you know, a definition fall into your description of Swaf? Phil probably has a better answer here, but those both seem kind of simple. So yeah, I mean, suave will have a suave chain that's, you know, able to do consensus, maybe faster with some different tradeoffs than ethel one consensus. But being able to have some notion of, you know, coordination and consensus is kind of necessary for, you know, coordinating these. And the way I
Starting point is 00:43:35 described it as like these, you know, things are written on smart contracts. Where do smart contract lives on a blockchain? Not all suave contracts will be on ethel one. So where are they on? They'll be on suave chain. And yeah, I mean exactly what kind of L2, you know, it would be, like a function of maybe how much it's basically putting to, you know, Ethel 1 for its own management or doing more of it on suave chain or even off of suave chain, you know, maybe to be determined. But yeah, I would at least be able to bridge to, you know, at least Ethereum. So it's in that sense that I mean it's an L2. So it can probably do a better job here. Yeah, no, I mean, I think I agree with everything Andrew said. I think the most broad view is like suave is this platform the same way, you know, there's a question of like, what is Ethereum? Is optimism
Starting point is 00:44:16 Ethereum? Like kind of not. You know, it's like it depends where you draw the line. I think, yes, a blockchain is ultimately just a data structure where suave probably differs from at least what immediately comes up for people when they think blockchain is kind of what Andrew said, that it's specialized for a very different set of use cases. So we're trying to build MEV time applications. We're trying to let users leverage their private information to get best execution. These basically give you a lot of requirements on like the performance of the system, the ways it can interact with blockchains that already exist and L2s that already exists and kind of require you to tailor very much the consensus to be specialized for that. So I do think it will be a blockchain
Starting point is 00:45:01 in that, yeah, we'll have shared state and some sort of contracts and possibly ability to deposit funds. I don't think it's aimed. at the same set of use cases other blockchains are in terms of, let's say, having long-running, like large contracts or mechanisms occurring versus like a more coordination style specialization. I think that means a lot of the tech stack has to be a little bit different, but also the abstraction is very useful. Maybe the only other point there is I think we want to be very flexible in what use case people have and like what the requirements are. So I think many of the SWOV apps we're envisioning, like either minimally would use any such blockchain or maybe possibly not at all.
Starting point is 00:45:44 Like a lot of this stuff you can possibly even do purely off-chain. And the blockchain is there basically to lend economic weight to certain actions or messages that require this weight in a trustworthy way. So, you know, your swab app deployment kind of depends on whether you need this or not for your use case. And if you do need it, whether swabs kind of data structures are the best way or whether you have a strong incentive to use something else. You can kind of mix and match in that you can kind of have your contracts on Ethel 1, your funds on optimism and your apps in the TEE, but there may also be advantages of using the swaff chain because it's kind of purpose built for a lot of this stuff. So there is a swaff chain. It is a blockchain, but that term can also
Starting point is 00:46:28 be misleading because people's existing mental models for blockchain are generally something like Bitcoin or Ethereum and a primary use case for these blockchains is storing your value across time. It's very much like 10 years from now, I want to, you know, my assets better be in my eth address, right? Or something has gone disastrously wrong with this, you know, property rights store value system that I have. Whereas it sounds like suave is kind of a different use case, which is more about like coordinating the present. It's more about kind of the present state. Would you say that's true? Yeah, I think that's largely true, especially for, the first wave of applications, and especially because blockchains do such a great job on, like,
Starting point is 00:47:08 long-term secure storage, and there's no reason not to leverage their validator set, et cetera, there. I think what's missing is this kind of other way. One interesting maybe discussion that's downstream of that is like, do you use SGX for privacy? And I think if you look at some of the projects, Andrew mentioned earlier, like Echidon and Oasis and things like that, it's a very different setting, they're trying to accomplish a different privacy guarantee, which is stronger than necessarily what suave needs. That doesn't mean that's not also a useful thing to have in suave. It just means that like the nuances of like your parameters and stuff may be a little bit more flexible. So for example, in suave, you may be able to accept a certain type of attack
Starting point is 00:47:51 because it only means you lose like uptime, like 0.1% of the time. Whereas in other systems, maybe you're not willing to accept that because even if it only happens 0.1% of the time, because even if it only happens 0.1% of the time, people's privacy gets compromised in ways where they get, you know, prosecuted or funds stolen or something really major happens to them. So for me, yes, all of these things are very much in the nuance of like what problems are we trying to solve, which here is MEV time problems. And, you know, what is the right security for the actual level of security you need for that particular privacy blob? I want to take a new lens for viewing swab, and that's through the lens of being a decentralized block builder. Phil, can you talk about how Suav is a decentralized
Starting point is 00:48:35 block builder and where those blocks actually go and what that even means? Can you just explain that process? Yeah, so the idea of decentralized block building is essentially once you have privacy, you can decompose what happens inside a block builder into different kind of processes and different parts. And there's really nothing fundamental that says that these processes need to occur on a centralized server or in one place. So one example is you can look at the ecosystem today or flashbots, for example. What do we do? We receive bundles from many searchers and other builders, potentially and users and
Starting point is 00:49:10 and whoever wants to send bundles from our own MevShare product also sends bundles. And then we try to combine these bundles into kind of the best package of non-conflicting bundles that offers the most value to the network. Now, we do a lot of this stuff literally on a centralize. of servers. We say, okay, run these combinations, like, if this combination looks good, try these other things, et cetera. There's no reason why that process has to all happen on Flashbot servers. So if you had instead, like, the set of rules that govern that process basically encoded as a mechanism or a smart contract, it's like, okay, what are the rules here, basically? The amount of profit
Starting point is 00:49:47 offered to the validator is the change in their coin-based balance after simulating this, like, attempt of bundles. The information that the builder has is this set of information, and they use it in this way in their algorithm. The idea of suave is basically to let you write those rules as a smart contract where, let's say FlashBots merges a bunch of bundles. And let's say instead, you know, you have a better set of bundles, right? Or you have one bundle that can merge into these. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to directly participate in that process in the same way any decentralized system lets you participate. And so that's kind of the idea is how do we split block building up into many modular
Starting point is 00:50:28 activities and maximize participation in these activities, especially when it doesn't need to be mutually exclusive. Like there's nothing really fundamental that says that us flashbots should be deciding every single order we simulate on our builder. And it's probably actually an efficiency loss that we have this. But we're not able to create an alternative without kind of more decentralized tools. SELO is the mobile first EVM compatible carbon negative blockchain built for the real world. And now something big is happening.
Starting point is 00:50:57 Introducing the SELO layer two. It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sello's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the SLO layer two on the Selo Forum. So has Ben Jones from optimism. But why? The Sello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one block finality. What does all that mean?
Starting point is 00:51:16 Rock solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum. and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on SELO have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the SELO layer 2, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas using ERC-20 tokens. But SELO is a community-governed protocol. This means that SELO needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard.
Starting point is 00:51:40 Join the conversation in the SELO Forum. Follow at SELOorg on Twitter and visit sello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Introducing GMX the deepest on-chain futures market to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, and leading alt coins. GMX is a permissionless decentralized exchange that offers perpetual futures and spot trading. Lightning fast trade execution and competitive pricing with the security and self-custody of a decentralized exchange. GMX is live now with V2, bringing new optimizations to on-chain leverage trading. And even more than an improved trading experience, GMX will reward you for just participating. All GMX users can easily set up a referral link, and with $12 million of Arbitron grants being distributed as incentives, and over $150 billion in trading volume to date, all settled on-chain, GMX is leading the charge in terms of opportunities for defy liquidity providers.
Starting point is 00:52:30 The future is on-chain with your wallets, with your trades, and with your money in your own hands. Try it out now at app.gmx.I.O. Introducing USDV, a better type of stablecoin. Currently, billions of dollars in stable coin yield each year. are paid to tether, circle, and other central issuers of major stablecoins. But what if yield could be shared with the protocols that use it? Those protocols, in turn, can decide how to reward their users. USDV shares its yield with a community of apps and developers that mint it.
Starting point is 00:53:00 Every USDV is backed one-to-one by U.S. Treasury bills which pay yield. This yield flows out to the community of USDV issuers, so your protocol or app can get paid for helping end-users convert other stables into USDV. This works thanks to a breakthrough technology called Color Trace from Layer Zero. Without it, it was impossible to attribute users of a token with a specific issuer,
Starting point is 00:53:23 but now we can. USDV is live on Ethereum, optimism, Arbitrum, and other chains, and it's already available on over 20 exchanges, such as Curve, BitGet, Velodrome, and Stargate. Start participating in the yield from Treasury-backed stablecoins at bankless.com slash usdv.
Starting point is 00:53:40 You've been using this idea of apps on suave. Are apps on suave kind of a way of putting all of these MEV searcher bots and then also larger bundlers into applications that are actually instantiated in suave? And so instead of like people running their little MEV searchers on their computer, parsing the mempool and trying to seek out some arbitrage, they can actually just code up an app and deploy it on suave and have that run. And that just now suave has that logic embedded in it persistently. over time. But also, that's a private app because I don't want to disclose my strategy to others.
Starting point is 00:54:15 I get to keep the strategy of that bot for myself and any profits that come out of that bot myself. Correct? This is how this works? Yeah, I mean, I think for searchers, do you have options? So, like, the easier or the less lift would be basically look at the activity you're doing saying, like, arbitraging, let's say a centralized exchange and a decentralized exchange. Are there modules you can port into this decentralized world that offer you some benefits? So for example, if you had privacy, maybe you could say, okay, here is my real strategy, assuming this is the price.
Starting point is 00:54:47 This is like the program I would run to generate the Ethereum transaction, given my knowledge of the Binance price. And then maybe that part, you can put more into the decentralized logic, but you still maintain some centralized component that, like, in a trusted way, gets the Binance price or something like that. So there may be kind of iterative decentralization steps you can take. Ultimately, yeah, the strongest is to basically have a, you know, a searcher where the entire searcher or solver in like a KauSoft style system is a smart contract,
Starting point is 00:55:16 is a mechanism, is run by many people running many off-chain components that somehow interact with this to create like the right game and the right output. I think there's super interesting applications there. One of the fun ones is you can have passive active LPs. So the whole passive active LP is like kind of an arbitrary distinction that comes because passive LPs can't actually update their preferences quickly enough on the blockchain while maintaining the level of decentralization that like, let's say something like Uniswap offers them. But these lines kind of disappear once you have like maybe Dow's or multi-sigs or other complex bots running in like more private domains. The world of block building competes on order flow. So whichever block builders have the most
Starting point is 00:56:03 amount of order flow, the most amount of transactions flowing through their system that they have and no one else has, that block builder is going to be able to produce a more valuable block and become more profitable of an organization. Why would Swave be a better alternative for order flow versus a centralized builder? Why will orders aggregate towards Swaf? Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally my thesis is that the value of decentralization and the amount of surplus that unlocks in the economy is like far higher than the technical overhead of decentralization. Again, I think that's dependent on the use case very much. We see USDT on Tron being very popular and not very decentralized,
Starting point is 00:56:44 and maybe for some use cases that's like totally, you know, okay. But there is certainly some value to decentralization. So the ability to have meta properties people care about, like censorship resistance or robustness or not being subject to any single regulatory regime because you're located within the balance of a jurisdiction, that unlocks a lot of value that we see in crypto today. So I think the question is, like, in terms of the things that Suav lets you do that you can
Starting point is 00:57:13 only do because they're decentralized, how valuable are those? And my thesis is, like, fairly valuable, even if you just look at a decentralized builder or a decentralized relay in Mevboos, and you look at relays versus builders today, and the real constraint centralization imposes, I think those outweigh kind of people's first impulse which is like, oh, the latency is very high, et cetera. I think actually, you know, the latency may be even far lower than they imagine. And so, but there is obviously always some communication overhead to decentralization. So does it outweigh the value?
Starting point is 00:57:49 That's the question. Sure. And just to tie a bow on this block building section, what does a block builder do? A block builder builds blocks. It produces blocks. And if suave is a decentralized block builder, the ultimate output of suave is a block. And then some Ethereum proposers, some Ethereum validators, like, oh, thank you, Suav, for the block, I choose you. And then they take the block and then it becomes part of Ethereum. This is how the
Starting point is 00:58:13 process works, correct? Yes. Yep. Love it. So during this entire time, when we've been talking about suave, we've used the term private many, many times. And Andrew, I know you have a particular interest in that space. In fact, that's maybe part of the reason you've decided to team up with flashbots and fill in the team over here. Tell me, why is privacy of Swave so important and what tech have you chosen for that and why? Well, I mean, privacy here relates to trust in the same way. If you say you're trusting a block builder, what are you trusting them not to do? And, you know, it's probably sufficient just to say, what do you need privacy for to avoid getting front run and sandwich attack. So whoever has your data and is computing on it, so like a builder or
Starting point is 00:58:51 relay in the MEV supply chain today, they get to see your data. They're computing on it. You trust them not to abuse that privilege, but that's just how it goes. You have to trust them. So I'm, you know, privacy and guaranteeing that you, do what you claim, that you follow your own stated policy with the sensitive data, those are one in the same in these kind of applications. And then, you know, what tech is chosen. So to start out, we are using trusted hardware enclaves and in particular Intel SGX. So these are, you know, this mode supported on a bunch of different Intel processors and, you
Starting point is 00:59:25 know, used to be on all sorts of laptops as well, but now it's like on Zon's going forward. And they have like an isolated execution environment where even the host of the computer even if you have kernel access, even if you have hypervisor access, you still can't tamper with or inspect the contents of computing while the processor is computing on that process. So it's basically a way of letting the computation happen on data without revealing it to even the person, you know, who's got root access on that machine. Andrew, people sometimes I've heard say SGX is, you know, has backdoors, it's not secure enough, this type of thing. What do you say, say to those criticisms? Why is it the right technology for Swath? So it's the right technology just because
Starting point is 01:00:09 there's no other viable alternative right now. And I think that with the right system design around it, it's just good enough to be, you know, useful for this kind of credible computation. So I mean, it's earned its reputation as kind of a train wreck. Like it's had like on a pace of maybe once per year or so for, you know, six years now or something going, like a catastrophic vulnerability in the, you know, GX microcode that requires them to have, you know, unusually long embargo time as far as security disclosures go, like often a whole year from private disclosure to Intel by the side channels and microarchitectural security researchers who find these.
Starting point is 01:00:48 And, you know, to when they patch it, because to patch it requires, you know, sending motherboard updates, bios updates, you know, to every compatible thing coordinating with cloud vendors and so on. So it's a huge mess. They have a process for updating to patch processors called TCB recovery, but it's only through, you know, design errors and implementation errors, you know, from Intel in these processors that these vulnerabilities occur. And then systems based on them have to basically appropriately rotate keys and service for, you know, old data that now can no longer be guaranteed.
Starting point is 01:01:19 The nice thing about situations and, you know, these mev time applications is especially the ones that are like short-lived, you know, a breach is maybe going to be like limited in a impact in between the duration that, you know, who's ever trying to exploit this can, try to exploit it and from when it's patched. And then when the recovery process, which is basically like key rotation and expiring old data, you know, takes place, there can be a fairly short time window when this is kind of relevant. So that's something that kind of is better for the MEV applications than things that inherently require this, you know, full on long term, you know, data storage forever. But so basically it's like because we're coordinating the present, right? And these things are sort of short-lived. It's a fine technology for something like that. But it might not be SGX, for instance, for a blockchain, for like a Zcash, for instance, or for an Ethereum,
Starting point is 01:02:05 you know, SGX might not be the right technology for a layer one stack. Well, I mean, I think it is for those two. So the problem is that SGX should be used when there's really no other alternative. And so this is kind of fundamentally when there is shared private state that you need. So if all you're doing is token transfers, you should just use Zcash in a shielded pool. So I don't think that there's any reason that you know, you should build an SGX-based, you know, privacy token because you can achieve that just using zero knowledge proofs. you shouldn't use on T's for that. On the other hand, if you want to do something where you actually need shared private state, then what else are you going to do? You either have to like pick a sequencer or something to share this kind of, you know, state with or you can try to do something like a threshold sequencer, but then that ends up not being really much different than, you know, this kind of proposal, like there's the risk of then, okay, now you've got a quorum of nodes, but together they could collude and decrypt all of the transactions that are supposed to be private. So even if you did that, you would want to use SGS.
Starting point is 01:03:01 on top of that as well as like a, you know, deterrent or, you know, an obstacle to collusion in that case anyway. So if you want to be able to access shared private state, then there's not really a better alternative. And I think you should use zero knowledge proofs, basically, you know, for absolutely everything else. Good thoughts there. Okay, so we've got suave as this private programmable MEPAW-Ware Mempool that produces this thing of great value, which is, you know, one of the apps is decentralized block building. Phil, could we just really quick rattle off the winds here? from various stakeholders. So if I'm Ethereum and Swave is kind of in existence and it is providing decentralized block
Starting point is 01:03:40 building, what's the win for Ethereum? It will go on like, how about other chains, other layer twos or maybe alternative layer ones, what do they win if Swave is fully realized? How about users themselves? What do they win? Could you go through this from like a stakeholder perspective? Because we've got a lot of different listeners, all of which are in crypto, you know, in some way.
Starting point is 01:04:01 And they're all kind of probably listening up to this point. And they're like, okay, now we understand what this elephant looks like, at least the contours of it, the shape of it. But what do we get out of this? What's in it for us? Why is this such a good thing? Yeah, well, I think for chains, what it's really giving you is the option to mitigate a lot of centralization pressure in your chain through these apps.
Starting point is 01:04:21 So things that would normally make your chain more centralized, give certain incentives to the biggest validators. You get some options to design solutions that basically reduce this. without needing to necessarily build all the infrastructure yourself. So in ETH very specifically, our hope is that the MEV market remains kind of competitive, permissionless, and fair. And there are certainly many forces that are incentivized to make that not happen. And so the more tools the protocol has,
Starting point is 01:04:51 the better a chance it has at, like, maintaining its decentralization. Ultimately, I think that matters in many downstream ways. probably the most extreme one is regulation. I wouldn't expect like a chain that was located entirely in one data center or jurisdiction to like, I would expect that to basically become a Tradfai product in the long run because it's not decentralized and like, you know,
Starting point is 01:05:14 wouldn't make sense to treat it as really anything different, you know, regardless of my opinions on that just from the world, basically. So I think that's a big value add for being a chain is just the ability to maintain your existing plans for decentralization. which if you don't have, then I guess there's little reason to use swab. You can just have a centralized flashboss builder the way we run it today, but just run it
Starting point is 01:05:37 with whoever's running your sequencer and call it a day. So let's just underline that for a second. The value for a chain, maybe we'll take Ethereum, the value for Ethereum with suave in existence is greater decentralization. And after all, isn't that the purpose of blockchain and crypto decentralization so that we can preserve these things like censorship resistance? and, you know, diffusion of our validator set and all of these things and the checks and balances that are inherent in the system. Like, that's the entire point. And you're saying you kind of
Starting point is 01:06:08 provide a shield for an existing chain like Ethereum to like bolster that and to resist the forces of centralization that are attacking it. That's what Swab is doing for Ethereum. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's always the goal of every chain, but I agree, like as a community, yes, that should be and is our goal. I think like for things like BNB or like some specific optimism them L2 that's maybe more centralized for whatever reason. Or you mentioned Tron with USCT, right? It's like whatever. Tron with USCT, yeah.
Starting point is 01:06:35 Yeah. So anyway, I think the incentive is less from that bolstering decentralization point of view. There still is some incentive of like accessing the value of that decentralization. So if in that decentralized pool of preferences, there's like valuable preferences on your domain, you maybe want to tap into that somehow to be able to like leverage its value. So like if there's cross domain preferences between. let's say your...
Starting point is 01:06:59 When you say preferences, is that the same as an intent, Phil, by the way? You can read it the same way, yeah. Okay, cool, cool, call it an intent. All right.
Starting point is 01:07:05 So if you have like a cross domain, let's say intent in like that case, right? You want to be able to leverage that as much as possible, which may require if it's protected by this like decentralized private block builder, actually engaging in that or interfacing somehow. So I think that those are the two values to an L1. Number one is like maintain your decentralization, and number two is access to the network effect of the kind of auction.
Starting point is 01:07:28 that's also fueled by other people who are trying to maintain their decentralization. Which could be huge. That could be huge. Okay. So how about a layer two? What benefit do you get from that from Swoff? Yeah. So a layer two, I think it basically is roughly the same thing. Like I think a lot of layer twos are in a very hard place right now looking at what to do with their sequencer. There's several choices. They can essentially run a centralized sequencer, which is what all the major ones are currently doing. Oftentimes, then you have to choose a policy that's like regulatory palatable to your lawyers. So like, for example, optimism centralized sequencer would be hard for me to imagine it extracting MEP on shitcoins just because of its
Starting point is 01:08:08 infrastructure position as like a product, you know? And so there's a lot you just can't do with a centralized sequencer. So clearly also for that plus being consistent with their values, a lot of these L2s want to decentralize the sequencer. But then you get into thorny questions of MEV basically depending on what design you choose so maybe for those parties it can provide kind of like a reference implementation almost of like here is what a decentralized stack could look like for you where you can like also maintain control to kind of customize this however you want you know and you can integrate with it or not and like the other carrot is kind of the network effect with all of the other domains that it's executing intense on i think the other thing it provides
Starting point is 01:08:51 essentially, so the third choice you have as in L2 is to essentially become a based rollup and kind of give your sequencing to the EFL1. I think that's also an interesting choice. It's kind of taking all of these hard MEV decentralization problems and kicking them back to L1 and saying, like, please, like, let me use your validator set to solve this for me. Would this be like eigenlayer restaking type of scenario? Are you thinking that? For example, for example, yeah. Or, you know, I think there are some research proposals out to even extend L1. to like offer some of this as like a service essentially. I think that is an interesting tradeoff point.
Starting point is 01:09:27 I expect it will be explored. I think probably what Suav lets you do there that you can't do with Ethel 1 is like customize things much more. So if you want certain distributions on your MEP, if you want a mechanism that's different than what EFL1 has, if you want your iteration process for your sequencer not to be basically lobbying ethyl1 politics to try to get changes in. If you need that control, then I think suave becomes attractive because Ethel 1 is certainly also
Starting point is 01:09:55 decentralized. How about alternative layer 1 ecosystem? So some of these very high throughput non-Eetherium chains like Solana comes to mind or like Aptos or Sui, often from the outside looking in a little bit, I often feel like these ecosystems just like haven't really addressed the MIV problem. And I worry a little bit with, you know, naive assumptions going into that when you have like, let's say, for instance, a jump capital who is building one of your clients. I wonder if that could have any downstream effects. Are there any wins for the high throughput salinas of the world with Swoff? I think there will be. I think that's less been our focus, given our limited resources in the last, let's say, six months. But it's for sure part of the design. Like the single part means like we need
Starting point is 01:10:38 to support those use cases. I think there are like fundamental limits given your system design on like how much you can decentralize. So to give you an extreme example, like if I always say, like, okay, in my consensus protocol, if you're more than one millisecond away from me, you just can't sign a block because in two milliseconds, I'm going to sign another one and fork you out. We can take a look at that and say, okay, how can we plug swab in to decentralize this more? And there are many ways. Like, you could have essentially suave native co-location with those nodes where what's actually being co-located is governed by this, like, private infrastructure and, like, the strategies that represents are kind of being protected there. That being said, you're still going
Starting point is 01:11:18 to run into like limits of what you can do versus like, let's say, if you have a 15 second. So, yeah, I think we're thinking about it. Curious if you have any thoughts on that also, Andrew, on like low latency swaps. But it's in the design, but it's also like, we'll do our best, but we're working within like the constraints of the protocol ultimately. Yeah, I have less thoughts on the, you know, low latency applications. I mean, to me, the like benefits and execution quality that you get come from, you know, batching often. So, I mean, you can build a slightly higher latency application on Solana if you want. I don't think that there has to be an inherent overhead associated with doing the private computing as to an alternative, but
Starting point is 01:11:57 anything done in a decentralized way will add some kind of latency. So I think somehow that's inherent, but, you know, I think this is basically providing like a different tradeoff, right? You don't maybe have to trade off as much as you might expect. And so, you know, this allows users to pick something that does provide private execution, even if that's okay with a small amount of latency tradeoff, then great. I want to get to the users, which is the last stakeholder and the benefits of digging, but just a quick, because I'm tempted here, just a quick side quest for you guys. Do you share my intuition that many crypto ecosystems just are naive with respect to kind of like MEP assumptions right now, and that will come back to kind of bite them in some way? And so, I mean,
Starting point is 01:12:36 I think we could certainly have pointed the finger at Ethereum, you know, four or five years ago when were getting started, right? And everyone was sort of naive to that. I think Ethereum has woken up and this may be doing better thanks to, you know, in no small part to what you guys are doing. But I'm wondering, sometimes I see these very high throughput, like a salonah for an example. And I just, I'm worried that they're not addressing the MEV problem, but then I also wonder, well, is that just an ETH bias? What do you think about that in general? Do you think that there are many ecosystems that are kind of naive to the problems of MEV? And what is the net effect of that? How could that come back to bite them? Yeah, I think this is actually super interesting. It's maybe a special
Starting point is 01:13:15 case of something we see more generally in blockchains and like the broader metagame of making a new chain. Like oftentimes sustainability is actually not what matters for like new projects. I think gas fees to me are like the clearest example of this. Like it's very easy to spin up a new L1 10x the Eith block space because you have no historical state to worry about. Have basically zero fees, crank down the block time and say, like, look how much faster and cheaper our chain is. We've done, like, so much innovation. Please come play over here. And you kind of ignore the fact that, like, the reason that EAT hasn't gone to those parameters is because there's, like, sustainability analyses that show that they're not sustainable. Same thing with, like, state
Starting point is 01:13:56 storage and, like, how much does it cost to write to the blockchain state is, like, maybe another weird economic parameter. I've researched way too much. So I think MEV is kind of the same where, like, you're almost incentivized not to solve it in the beginning because it's hard it requires a lot of research and like work and it doesn't really kick in in terms of kicking you in the teeth until you really achieve adoption and so with those problems it's very easy to say like okay our problem is achieving adoption and once we do that we'll worry about all those other things because we'll have already been successful and like it'll be great i think this is like a common mentality in software so yeah i agree but i think it's also like a broader instance of this where like
Starting point is 01:14:36 The incentive to solve MEV if you have like $2 million a year of dex volume on your system is fairly low because it won't probably collapse your whole thing immediately. That being said, it's worth working on it early because otherwise you get blindsided. I've had several fun experiences there. I think one is with ETH itself, right? Kind of beating this drum for a long time and then people ignoring it and saying, eh, it's not an issue. It's a small volume. Like this is not real. and then, you know, suddenly they wake up overnight and like 99% of their hash rate is like
Starting point is 01:15:08 behaving in a way they considered adversarial before. And suddenly, like, it's a thing they're all paying attention to. I think that's what you'll probably see with every other L1. Even another interesting example is uniswap. So, like, I was trying to shill MEV to uniswap for a long time, you know, and it was like very difficult. But now today, I think they are actually thinking about these things and like building new products around it.
Starting point is 01:15:31 So at some point, once you actually get adoption, you don't really have a choice anymore because this is like what people will start complaining about. But before that, it's like, it's a tough sell to work on it. Yeah, that's a great point. Thank you for indulging that side quest. All right. So the last set of stakeholders is users. Can we talk about user welfare in a world where suave exists? How do they stand to benefit? Yeah. So I mean, my thesis is pretty simple, which is like you will not internalize the value of your data, of your transaction as a user, unless you have privacy. There's just no market structure in which you efficiently do that. Why? Because, like, what are your choices? You can sell it to someone, but then you have to negotiate a price under information asymmetry.
Starting point is 01:16:10 And when they go to actually execute that or serve your auction, there's now a principal agent conflict between you and them where they're incentivized to screw you as much as possible. And there's no recourse for you. There's no falsifiability. And there's no competition keeping them honest either. It's kind of what you see in TradFi. It's why Pf off negotiation in bulk is so profitable for the people that do that. On the other hand, I think as a user, what you want is you want your order and your information, anything you're selling. You want competition and you want basically leverage over like the competition. And I think that's what privacy provides you. It's the ability to kind of play strategically without putting all your cards on the table. And if that can still lead to kind of an outcome in the computation, for you it will be a better outcome because you're not giving away the actual value of your thing up front. If you're auctioning off, let's say, Uniswap X order, you have to give the parameters of the order up front in order for people to price it. And at that point, it's lost a lot of its value because there's not really competition on the information anymore. The information is available. So anyway, that's my rant.
Starting point is 01:17:18 I think if you want the best price as a user and you actually start designing these mechanisms, if you don't have privacy, you will end up with privacy somewhere. and it will be centralized. It's what we see with Uniswop X. There's no privacy, but there's a centralized server that, like, permission gates who has access to the information and also generates fake information on your behalf that they know is fake, but no one else knows.
Starting point is 01:17:42 So you end up with kind of trust in the system in that way, and that's centralizing. Can I just summarize maybe all of this, all of the wins for stakeholders? And I wonder if it just is as simple as this. If we want a system that is different than TradFi, suave helps make that, possible. Swave helps enable that. Or it's a shield to prevent our system from becoming more like
Starting point is 01:18:03 the TradFi banking system we just left. Is that the summary here? Yeah, I think that's accurate for MEV. I think the obvious thing to do from here is to just redesign Tradfi. I think in doing so, we'll lose a lot of what's made crypto valuable and special and interesting to a lot of people. And I think we deserve alternatives. So the role of Swab is to maybe provide alternatives there. property about suave that I find interesting is it's very meta. Like being pre-blockchain, being in the mempool or even pre-m-pool layer is a very meta place to be. One of the problems that I'm seeing being solved in 10,000 small ways is the fragmentation of Ethereum scalability roadmap. You know, 50 new roll-ups show up every single week and all of a sudden there's 50 different places to find scale. I saw when I learned about
Starting point is 01:18:55 intense. I was like, oh, this is a way to abstract away all of these different chains away from users. And all of a sudden, the choices about, like, where to find liquidity and how to bridge and which assets to route through and ultimately what chain to be on could, in theory, be abstracted. I'm wondering, Phil, if you just have any thoughts about how suave might help abstract all of the many, many, many different layers that are being built on Ethereum. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think there's many different types of centralization. and it's important to kind of think about which one you mean. So one type of centralization that's actually very useful
Starting point is 01:19:31 and helpful to other types of decentralization is logical centralization. So this is kind of what the EVM provides. It's like one standardized centralized way to write your financial application. And it's not centralized from the point of view that one person is running it, but it's centralized from the point of view
Starting point is 01:19:49 if there's one language. And I think that's like the U ambition of suave is to provide the language and the platform and the logical centralization without introducing kind of architectural or infrastructure centralization, which is the obvious way to kind of logically centralize things, is to just also centralize everything else. So I think, yes, that common abstraction, that logical centralization, that unification is for sure one of the things that lets people decentralize because it then lets them kind of specialize in how they're executing it. I think the M-EV-M is a big part of this. This is partially your meme, Andrew, so curious
Starting point is 01:20:27 about the vision, I guess, for pre-compiles, because I think it also fits into this, like, having some set of logically centralized things. You said the M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-M-E-V-E-M-E-V-E-E-V-E-E-E-V-E-E-E-V-E-E-E-V-E-E-E-V-E-E-E-V-E-E-E-V-E-E-RUUU-RU-S-U-RU-S, right? I got to workshop that. Yeah, but I don't know, I'm sure that. So, I mean, the abstraction is basically, there's now this abstraction of a mev time application that you can write like as a smart contract application. So what's happened is I thought of it as a separating thing, but it'll be a unifying thing here as an abstraction, but it's a separating of kind of what's now, you know,
Starting point is 01:21:09 a block builder is both, you know, running their own hardware, providing this compute work. They're also defining their own policy and, you know, their own implementation of it and, you know, promising to stick to it. So to me, the simplest way of viewing, you know, what's different here is that we're now separating the roles of actually carrying out the computation, providing these untrusted compute resources, and defining applications, which can now just be writing smart contracts. You don't have to run a trusted, you know, data center that you know, picture yourself by trust. So, you know, that separation of tasks means that the now unified notion is, you know, writing a me of time application and having a smart contract way to do that, you know, to me is the thing that really opens up kind of an abstraction. Almost like a solidity for block builders then, Andrew? Yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 01:21:51 One property that I learned that was interesting, going back to this abstraction of Ethereum's layer two is that it actually works equally well with other layer ones. It's like having token A on the Ethereum layer one and desiring token B on like an Ethereum layer two, you know, an intent can get you there. A market maker can help fulfill that order. But if liquidity is on Solana for this one token, something that Swav can do is that, well, you can swap from token A to token.
Starting point is 01:22:18 token B on Ethereum Layer 1 to Ethereum Layer 2, and a market maker can tap into liquidity on Solana in order to achieve that goal. And so it's just like this generalized abstraction layer that can do quite a lot. I don't really have a question here, but I think just the power of that is pretty phenomenal. I know. I just almost feel like emphasizing on that, is the left curve take on this? This is going to fix CryptoUX? Is that true? Is there something to that? I think possibly, I mean, I think it depends how many people build and integrate on top of it and like the quality of the ux work we do because crypto ux tends to be like a history of us shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again so hopefully we don't hopefully we don't repeat that
Starting point is 01:22:57 you know process but yeah i mean i think it gives you a lot of new tools for building new types of crypto ux like much more abstracted products in general like i think you could even have products that like somehow interact with swab and give you some guarantees about blockchain state but maybe the blockchain somehow is even more abstracted from this than just like which token is being processed on maybe i think one fascinating direction eventually is like okay do you want like lLMs on the blockchain how do you want to interface with these you know like that kind of brings up these questions of like how do you actually do that in a decentralized way so yeah i think there's a lot of new ux things you can do and hopefully people build like the nice front ends to go along with it in a
Starting point is 01:23:42 decentralized sphere. I do think we're going to have in for sure in like a few years, way more options for like building abstracted crypto apps. And maybe that's like a lot of what's been missing in crypto. Yeah. So let's get into the final details here, which is when does this become a reality? So what's the roadmap for suave? What are the big obstacles that are left to get over? And when can we start to see is may net the appropriate word here? Like when suave main net? I mean, you could have a suave test net that produced real Ethereum. one blocks without count. Yeah, that's something. Yeah, sure. When do I get that? Yeah, I mean,
Starting point is 01:24:16 I think it's a great question. I think our current timeline, which is subject to the usual, you know, engineering constraints is like, I think we are building kind of modular pieces towards this vision that are almost very separate, but will come together into one system, including
Starting point is 01:24:32 things like infrastructures for the chain and commitments, pre-compiles for MEV, privacy modules that are secure against, like, various attacks. I think you will see for sure much more by the end of the year and into Q1. I think we plan to have more public docs about where we're at. Our loose target is having some sort of test net for people to play with sometime in Q1. But before that, there will be components released. Like our bar for
Starting point is 01:25:01 really having that completed product includes having some sort of privacy solution and things like that, you may see much sooner like parts of the system that are already kind of in internal testing. So yeah, stay tuned. I would say Q1 is like the big one, but definitely there will be, as we go there, things along the road that will be interesting if you care about building on suave. So this episode was really about shining a light on the different parts of the elephant, trying to show a picture to the listeners what could be. Andrew, are there any parts that we've left unilluminated, any stones that we've left unturned? Is there a trunk somewhere we haven't felt felt around? Yeah, if you just want a rabbit hole to go down, where should they go? Oh, man. No,
Starting point is 01:25:44 I think this has been a pretty good conversation that's covered a bunch of it. I'm really interested in kind of how it turns out that the developer experience goes. You mentioned kind of U.X. We've talked a bunch about architecture things, something that to me is kind of, you know, really essential to the choice of, you know, using solidity and something based on EVM to start is really like name at kind of making something that's, you know, good for smart contract innovators. I really want to see like smart contract innovators being able to wield privacy tools kind of in general. So this is a good fit for that. I think that there's a lot to be excited about. I mean, to me playing around with this, like, this is an amazing programming model and it's
Starting point is 01:26:18 full of like inspiration and ideas that I can't even, you know, see it. So I think that there will be a lot of surprising ideas for applications that are hard to anticipate. So that's kind of what I'm the most looking forward to. If you want to drop some alpha along that vein, one fun one is like sneakers or concert tickets on suave anyone those options are pretty bad in the real world wait so can we can we start to export some of this stuff to the outside world i actually think it's a funny conversation actually and this is maybe where we could kind of end things phil which is like do you know like the problems of taylor swift you know conference tickets being front run yes that went before congress yes yeah no and it's we talk about taylor swift internally more than you
Starting point is 01:26:57 would ever want to imagine so yeah i couldn't believe it we had senators and congressmen trying to figure out how do we regulate this better so that, you know, the average American can get access to a Taylor Swift concert, which is maybe where we want to close because we've been talking about this entire episode. That's why we're here. Yeah, well, to solve concert tickets sales, to help people see Taylor Swift. I mean... So I can go to see Taylor Swift. So we've been talking the whole time about why crypto needs suave. And it's almost very obvious to us like four or five years in, like MEV front running, all of these things are massive problems. So all of crypto knows that we need it. And if you don't know,
Starting point is 01:27:30 it's just because your blockchain hasn't gotten enough usage for these problems to crop up. So you're going to find, you're going to find out, okay? So this is why crypto needs swab. That's already been established. But at some level, I feel like our industry, and we do lots of crazy things, of course, but one of the areas we are really pioneering in is solving coordination failure problems, seeing these better economic mechanisms that can create, like, better cooperative games and better outcomes.
Starting point is 01:27:57 And I think we are front running that. we are ahead of the rest of the world with respect to that. But it is a problem set and domain that spans outside of crypto to Taylor Swift concert tickets to obviously tradify, which we talked about so much, to like, how do we solve the AI alignment problems? It's all kind of there. And I'm wondering maybe this is a meta question on which to end, Phil and Andrew, is we've talked about why crypto needs suave. Why does the world need suave? How can we then take this and export this to the rest of the world?
Starting point is 01:28:30 Because I think your ambition maybe doesn't stop with solving coordination failure problems within crypto. I think you probably see, once you see it, you see the world is full of these coordination problems and this can be actually something we export to the world. How does that happen? Yeah, maybe I'll take the first stab and let Andrew have the last word on this in his cypherpunk framework. So I totally agree.
Starting point is 01:28:51 I think these coordination problems are like rife. The world is rife with these and like they're very much paris. parasites on our efficient coordination and execution and ultimately happiness. You mentioned some great examples, TradFi, Taylor Swift tickets, even the existence of ticket master as a whole is like, it's a symptom of a coordination failure caused by like a breakdown of trust in like the market. You look at even like the cars market or something, right? There are seminal papers about like, how do we solve trust in these markets and the best things we've come up with so far are like, okay, have a warranty and an inspection body that like keeps some records in like this centralized
Starting point is 01:29:29 way that everyone pays like $100 a month to subscribe to. Google ads another interesting one, like in front of the DOJ right now being sued because they were allegedly manipulating their own auction. And because the rules of that auction are so complicated, it's not even clear whether they were or not like de facto. Like yes, that was the outcome, but it's not even clear whether that was the intent because there's so much trust placed in them. And it's such a Rube Goldberg and it's so hard to like unpack. So yeah, I don't know. I think in all of these verticals like these things, they're costing people money in terms of like rent on top of their transactions and they're costing us social surplus in terms of like what businesses can we create,
Starting point is 01:30:09 what structures do we have, you know, many mollocks as we would say in crypto. So yeah, I'll let Andrew have the last word, but that's my rant. I do think we can go far beyond crypto. This is I think what crypto is trying to do, but I think we can't do it if we don't solve MEV. So they go hand in hand for me. Yeah, yeah, I was like perfectly put. I mean, decentralized systems, Web 3, blockchains, I think these all have, you know, no limit to their ambition of trying to reinvent institutions, coordinations, everything, kind of, you know, support human coordination more broadly. Those are all, I think, the right goals. I think this kind of technology, you know, trying to make and swap is addressing some of the obstacles to that and will be necessary to, you know, reach that vision.
Starting point is 01:30:48 But yeah. Well, guys, we are cheering you on. And now we know at the end of this episode, we don't have to worry about M-EV because Phil and Andrew, they got it covered. You guys have to, you and everyone else, whether it's like an app developer, L1, user, whatever, competitor of flashbots, please help us build a decentralized future. Shout out. Where do you need the most help, Phil? I'm serious about that. Like, yes, your team deserves a lot of help and needs a lot of help.
Starting point is 01:31:12 You want people to, you know, what's the shout-out for help? Build swaps, brainstorm swaps in various contexts. think about decentralization, engage in our research conversations around privacy, and we have, like, many, many research topics that are active. We're constantly putting out papers. So whatever you're interested in, like, come engage. But ultimately, really my ask is, like, build the decentralized future. Like, think about it really critically. Like, what do we need for decentralization? Is this the right way or not? And let's, like, work together rather than, like, us solving it and telling everyone how to do it. I don't think that will be decentralized.
Starting point is 01:31:49 So that's why we need your help to really make it decentralized. There you go. We will leave some links in the show notes for references to building swaps and getting started with everything FlashBots and Swab. Phil and Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you for doing what you do. Yeah, for real. We appreciate this.
Starting point is 01:32:04 Thank you for having us. Super fun. Great conversation. Some action items, Spankless Nation. I'll include a link to those things in the show notes. Also, an original episode that we did with Phil. It must have been over two years ago. Crypto's existential threat.
Starting point is 01:32:16 It's in there if you want some more background on MEV. We've also thrown since we manifested the name Moloch, and if you don't know what that means, we've got a few episodes on slaying Moloch. So we'll include that in the show notes as well. Got to end with this. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in,
Starting point is 01:32:31 but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.