Bankless - David's Takes: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Riding an MEV Bot

Episode Date: August 17, 2023

Welcome to David's takes. A new format with David and RSA where we explore David's weekly articles in 30 minutes or less. This week, we’re diving into one gigantic metaphor. Ethereum as a reserviour of liquidity. So sit back, relax, and enjoy "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Riding an MEV Bot". Read David's article here: https://www.bankless.com/a-hitchhikers-guide-to-riding-an-mev-bot/  If you're looking for a more technical explanation check out our recent episode with Dan Robinson: https://youtu.be/h4gzZib0j48  ----- 🏹 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   ⁠ 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap%E2%81%A0    👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  ----- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:00 Why did David Write This? 6:17 A Reserviour of Liquidity 9:25 The Ships Metaphor 13:36 Offchain Signed Orders 17:17 Intents 22:07 Dutch Auctions 24:06 Impications Of This? 28:25 How This Impacts Bridges 30:30 What's Left To Unpack? 33:15 Closings And Disclaimers ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

If you look at the original Xbox games, the graphics sucked. And then if you looked at the late stage Xbox games, graphics were like orders of magnitude better, but it was the same hardware. How did that happen? It's because the software got better. And so this is the software of Ethereum layer, improving what we can do with the hardware layer of Ethereum. Hey, Bankless Nation, we've got a new show format for you.

This one's short, punchy. It's a deep dive into a crypto rabbit hole that David and myself are exploring. These are our takes, take them or leave them, 25 minutes max. It's going to be our punchiest episode ever, right, David? God, it's pretty ambitious if they were going to do this in 20 comments or less. It would be a first. Each of these episodes will focus on one specific theme. On today's episode, we're talking about an article that David published recently in the bankless newsletter.

It's called A Hitchhiker's Guide to Writing an M.E.V. David, why'd you write this article? Why is this topic important? Yeah, because every once in a while we go down, collectively, the crypto world goes down the crypto rabbit hole, which we're all carving out, and then we find something new. we find something while we're digging in the crypto rabbit hole. And what we have found recently is this what the world of the M.A.V. industry of crypto is calling intense. Intense. Intense as in I intend to do something. And the idea here is that this brand new fertile field that we've just unlocked could be real big, real big. And why this is such a big deal and why this, why I wrote a whole entire article about this is that an intent in theory inverts the,

relationship that the average Joe swapper on Ethereum, the average on-chain swapper, has with the MEV vertical. Right now, there's an adversarial relationship with swappers and MEV. MV wants to eat up the value of all the swappers, and the swappers wants that to not happen. And then with Intents, we actually can make these people be on the same team and actually get them to collaborate and cooperate, which is part of the bulk case of crypto is learning how to align incentives. And so Intense is a mechanism for swapping that aligned incentives between swappers and MEV. That's the big idea and that is the thing that we have potentially discovered while we are going down the crypto rabbit hole. I completely agree. This rabbit

hole goes deep. So we're going to begin exploring it in today's episode. But first, we disclose nothing big or specific in this episode. Both David and I hold ether. Uniswap X is a subject of today's episode. Uniswap has previously been a sponsor on the bankless podcast. This is my time to remind you that we are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's link to all bankless disclosures in the show notes at all times. Before we begin, we also want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Cracken, our number one recommended exchange for 2023. Extra thanks to Cracken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023, whether you're dollar cost averaging into crypto to prepare for the bull market or you're taking profits

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U2Swap X has opened up a brand new landscape to play it, and it's the world of intense. This is where those who employ the swapping ability get to team up with the evil MEV bot army, and they get to band together to discover the most efficient liquidity route through the Ethereum landscape. Gas-free swaps, M-E-V protection, and theoretically optimal pricing. When swappers and M-EVers come together, new metas happen, and is thanks to Unoswap-X.

So the next time you trade on Unoswap, consider clicking the Unoswap-X button to get your M-EV protection. And so, if we're truly entering a bull market phase in crypto, which we totally are, then tokens are going to start flying all over the place. So if you're an organization looking to grow with token incentives, then look at no further than Toku.

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And for all the listeners out there who listen to the mountains of content that we turn out each week, especially this one right here. So let's go on to the show. A Hitchhiker's Guide to Writing an M-EV bot. Okay, David, what's the big idea here? So I use metaphors when I write. I think it's the best way to explain some of this stuff. And so I start this article with this metaphor of Ethereum as just one gigantic ocean of liquidity.

If there's one activity that we do on Ethereum, it's swapping tokens. Like Ethereum, if you want to be ultra-reductive and kind of make a jab at Ethereum, You'll just call it like one gigantic decks. Like that is what Ethereum is. It's just an exchange. It's like it's a marketplace for marketplaces. So it's like a meta decks. Like you can host many decks on Ethereum.

But really Ethereum just is a place to swap tokens and assets. If you don't really want to dumb it down. The term ocean is kind of interesting too because the ocean implies some depth, right? You can have more shallow parts of the ocean. You can have deeper parts of the ocean. Yes. There's that. Yeah.

And that relates to this term called liquidity. right? And we all know what liquidity is in crypto. It is just the, how deep market, like, order books are on an exchange or how much assets are in a uniswap liquidity providing position. There's this, like, fundamental relationship that, like, at a very deep level that water and liquidity and assets and markets all have with each other. And it's why, it's why we use the words liquidity. That's not a coincidence. It's because people, people way back when, discovered that there's a relationship, a pattern between, like, actual water and the liquidity of market structures. And so this is why I call Ethereum a reservoir of liquidity. It holds a bunch

of liquidity in uniswap AMMs in like, you know, God forbid, Ether Delta once upon a time. Zero X and actually the originator of off-chain order, zero X. And now we have Uniswap, right? Curve is another reservoir. So like think of curve as like a very big lake or maybe a curve is ocean uniswap is also another ocean uh we got velodrome which is a smaller little tiny ocean on a layer two but really in you with you summate everything ethereum is like you know the earth with all of its oceans put together and in order to navigate across this landscape of ethereum if you view the ethereum as a landscape which you ought to because like every single contract address or your ethereum address is a destination and in order and then you also you also have tokens

inside of your addresses and each of those tokens have addresses, little destinations all across this world. And we need, sometimes to do our transacting, we need to go from place A to place B, from token contract address A to token contract address B. And this is what the activity of swapping is. You're going, you have USC in one contract address and you need to turn it into another token or ether, which is at a different contract address. So like, we're putting this into metaphors, we actually need to travel across Ethereum's liquidity pool. pools, pools of liquidity. And we actually need to do something. We need to make a transaction to get that job done for us. And this is like starting to set the scene for like what is

this big metastructure of Ethereum. But we have these liquidity pools with different assets all over Ethereum. And then we have to go across these pools in order to get our jobs done. And that's kind of where I start off this article with this metaphor. Yeah. And you were using so if you picture Ethereum as this ocean of liquidity, right? In the rest of this article, this kind of resonated with me, you use this metaphor of ships. And you say this at the beginning. As swappers on Ethereum,

we're about to upgrade our ships, moving from gas-guzzling clunkers that blasts through the swells to sleek yachts, oh, yachts, that stealthily send you where you need to go without disturbing the waters.

You've got this image here, and on the one side, it says, on-chain, Dex Trade. And this looks like some sort of, I don't know, standard ship that is, you know, going through the ocean.

It's a tugboat. Yeah. It's a tugboat. boat or something, there's, there's a massive amount of wake. It's just pushing water. It's like a bulldozer going through the water, just like pushing the water around it, just leaving a massive wake. It's got this like messy like pipe that's just burning oil at the back.

It is just brute forcing its way through the water. Yeah. All right. And you're calling that the on-chain dextrade, which is now. That's where we live. That's the current meta of things. Yeah, I use Uniswap that's an on-chain dextrade. So you're saying that's like a big.

freaking tugboat. And then you've got this other side, juxtapose, as you say, off-chain signed order. And I don't, I have no idea what I'm looking at. But this looks like a stealth yacht. It's making, it's going through the ocean, but it's making very little waves, you know, very little movement, not much wake.

And you're calling that the off-chain signed order. It looks like also that, you know, the scene is at night. So something stealthy is implied here as well. So why this metaphor? Why are you painting this picture? Yeah, so both of these images are actually made with Med Journey just to aesthetically please.

Really? Really? I could tell the second one was. I didn't know the first one was. Yeah, the first one definitely was. Well, think about how big all those wakes are. I think the prompt was like metal heavy tugboat with massive wake or anything like that. Okay. So I was, so actually, can you pull up another tab and type in C Shadow I-X-529? C-Shadow. Yeah.

Okay. C shadow IX 529 yeah IX stands for What was this thing? Okay, okay so now type in F117 Nighthawk You can just do F117 F117 nighthawk

Okay F117 Yeah so this is a self This is a stealth fighter famous stealth fighter right Developed by Lockheed Martin They have all the the ship This is a plane This is a jet. This is a stealth jet, one of the first stealth jets ever.

And the angles on this ship are meant to absorb radar and also not leave awake. And so they also were charged with building this Navy sea shadow ship, which is kind of the same version. But as a ship. And it's built in this way that is, A, it absorbs radar so you can't see it. And B, also doesn't leave a wake. Because it's great if it doesn't show up on radar, but if you could just see the wake of this ship that it leaves behind. the white churny waters behind it in its path, then all of your stealth technology goes to nothing

if you just leave a wake. So it's also built in this way to cut through the water so that you can't detect it as it goes from point A to point B. And then on the other, and that's supposed to be in contrast to like this tugboat, which is like, I don't give a F, just like, get out of my way, liquidity, I'm pushing you aside,

and I'm brute forcing my way. And so these represent two different strategies from crossing Ethereum's waters. And now, remember, Ethereum doesn't do like, doesn't have an army. And so you're allowed to do as much M-E-V as possible, which is why like, you know, in the normal world, we have like armies and militaries to protect us. But in the Ethereum world, which doesn't have an army, and anything is fair game, we actually need to be more adversarial in how we choose to cross its liquidity oceans

because there's no army to protect us. And so we all need to develop strategies that are protective of our payloads, which are our swaps. Ooh, these metaphors, these analogies are starting to stack up here. Okay, but so before we continue on that, we'll park this idea of two different ships, an on-chain dextrade, messy, huge, like, wake, it's just pushing the water out of its way. Off-chain signed order, stealthy, sleek, cutting through water, below radar, undetectable. What is an off-chain signed order? We know what an on-chain dextrade is, okay?

That's where you go to un-swap, you make a swap, it's all on-chain, you could, everyone can see it. what is an off-chain signed order? And what does that have to do with what we were talking about in the intro, this word intense. Yeah. So an off-chain signed order stands in contrast to an on-chain dextrade. So an off-chain sign order, it's actually pretty similar to an on-chain dextrade, except that you don't actually execute it as a transaction. And because of that property, you can construct your transaction differently than if you had

on like Uniswop or sushi swap or Curve or anything. that's an on-chain dext trade. So with an on-chain dext trade, you put in certain parameters that are, like, fixing, fixing variables in your transaction, because if you don't fix them, then the MEV bots come and eat them, right?

So, like, with our tugboat, who's just, like, bulldozing through Ethereum's liquidity, it's a lot of things are hard-coded into them, because if they're not, then the MEV monsters will get in and eat that transaction up. And so, like, what am I talking about here? We have token A, want token B.

We are setting like, hey, we're only accepting 3% slippage. And then we're also going to go through this route. And so Uniswap actually as a product, and so does sushi swap and, you know, anything that has an order router, an order router, think of that as like loading up your ship, your tugboat, your slow heavy tugboat with like a predetermined path through Ethereum. liquidity pools to get from point A to point B. And so you're saying, this is my path, and I'm only going to allow for 3% slippage to get there. We're hard-coding all these parameters in in order to make sure that, like, when we get across this path, the M-EV monsters only 8, like 3% of our transaction, or 2%, whatever we set our slippage to. These are parameters that we're all encoding into our transaction to protect us.

It's like adding panels to our ship, big metal panels to our ship. And it actually, every single parameter that we hard-cote is also an additional gas cost. And that's just what it takes for individuals to get across Ethereum if they are going to construct their own ship using an on-chain dextrade. We need to get across somehow, so we've got to build our own ship. And that's what Uniswap and any order router does when they help us make a transaction that is an on-chain dextrate. We are basically custom building our own ships. An off-chain sign transaction is very, very, is like the inverse of this. And so all you're doing when you sign an off-chain intent.

An off-chain just means that you're not actually going to execute this as a transaction. You are going to, with your private keys, sign a transaction, but not broadcast the transaction with an intent to- So no gas. No gas. Just to sign transaction. Yeah. So, like, you can take an Ethereum transaction that you would broadcast to the mempool,

and then you can just sign it and not broadcast it to the mempool. And that becomes an off-chain signed order. So, like, an off-chain sign order is like a precursor to a transaction that's on-chain, but it does not become a transaction on chain by you. And so what do you do with this off-chain signed order is that you just state your intent. I have 2,000 USDC on the Ethereum layer one. I would like one ether on the Ethereum layer one.

Or I actually would like one ether on optimism or Arbitrum or ZKSink or whatever. You just sign what you want and your minimum amount of desired tokens on the other side. And so you're saying, I've got 2,000 USC and I will accept no less than one ether. And anybody who can service this is free to take this transaction and execute it. So that's why we call these intents, right? It's an intent. So I intend to provide 2,000 USDC in exchange for one ether. And you kind of broadcast that.

You're not broadcasting that on chain. You're broadcasting this to all of the MEV bots. You're broadcasting it to the MEV stack, which is usually the thing that you're trying to hide from, but instead you just actually tell them what you want. And that is the big unlock. Who's in the MEV stack? What is the swarm? All the monsters. So you have MEV arbitrages, like liquidity pool balancers, sandwich attackers, you've got like just decks arbitrager. So if two different pools on Uniswap and Tushi swap are unbalanced, then they'll reorder it. The entire spectrum of possible arbitrage opportunities are encoded into MEV bots on Ethereum around

Ethereum. They're like this swarm of things around Ethereum that make sure that everything inside of Ethereum is maximally efficient. So like when you say like what is it, it's like is everything that is relevant to markets. It's the hive. It's whoever can make a profit, profit, whether these are like market makers or bots or some combination or, you know, anyone who is willing to make a profit on this exchange here. Right. And, part of this stack is it's probably becoming very, very verticalized. So market makers and M-EV bots are probably collapsing into the same vertical, for example. So this just turns into a vertical of like the efficiency checkers of Ethereum markets. So like if anything is disturbed

in Ethereum, then they will rebalance it. And this is why we go back to this metaphor of liquidity and disturbing, or here's a word, dislocating pools, dislocating Ethereum's pools or liquidity is like when you take 2000 USDC out of the Uniswap pool and you put it into the Uniswap ether pool, like you're taking, you take water, scoop it up out of one pool and you dump it in another pool because you just made a trade. Well, all of a sudden you've dislocated Ethereum's pools and that is like signals to Emmy the MV boss like ooh chaos disturbances. I need to go consume that chaos and rebalance the pools. because of that's what arbitrage is.

So this is why the tugboat that's like blasting its way through the waters of Ethereum because it's just a super inefficient ship, it like attracts every single MEV bot under the sun because it's creating imbalances in its wake. That's why you don't want to leave a wake

because you attract MEV bots. And so all of these custom built ships that we're making when we make a transaction on uniswap or sushi swap, we're just using, we're making like a one-time ship to get us from point A to point B and it's like super messy

and heavy and laden and gas inefficient because we have to layer on all these MEV protection mechanisms or else we'll get eaten. And so this is what MEV bots do. They've rebalanced dislocated pools. And this is why there's this antagonistic relationship between on-chain decks trades and MEV bots because MEV bots abhor chaos. They want to absorb that chaos and turn it back into order. And that order is an efficient market.

This is kind of cool. Going back to that example, if you have 2,000, and you want one ether for that. So say you broadcast your intent to this bot network that you're saying to buy one eth on optimism using 2000 USDC, you start your offer at 2010 USDC and ratchet the order increments downward to 2,000 USDC. With this, a million ships appear to inspect your offer, all in a standoff with each other. The order begins at 2010 USDC, but that's ludicrous.

ETH isn't worth a tenth of a penny more than a 2003.75. Where in some other market that's trading? I'm just making these numbers in this scenario, yeah. Of course. And this process goes down until some, you say, to some bot, finds the price point at which it wants to fulfill this order. And then suddenly pop out of the swarm, a single ship emerges, darts forward, grabs the payload, and stuffs it inside of it and zips off to the horizon to fulfill the job. What was the execution price?

In these made-up numbers, examples, 2004.31 cents. All the MEV bots update their price model for ETH, and now we have the market price of ETH. It's $2,04.31. So I'm glad that this little scenario that I made sense to you because I actually effed up and got the numbers wrong. It should actually go up, not down. And so I should have said, like, we start the price at $1990,

and then it increments upwards. Until a bot actually fulfills that. But like the idea is that you actually get the idea. So like here the idea, this is the Dutch auction. This is the part that Uniswap X has brought to the intense landscape. Is this idea of a Dutch auction. So what is the Dutch auction? It's like you start selling something and you start really high traditionally.

So like saying you're selling a widget for 10,000 units. And then you start incrementing down like 10,000 units, 9,000 units, 8,000 units until someone buys it. and the person that wants it the most that is going to pay the highest price is going to buy it first. And that's the elegance of a Dutch auction. So this is what we're doing. This is what Uniswap X is doing with its off-chain signed orders. And so it creates an off-chain signed order that is also imbued with a Dutch auction in it. And so swappers want the best price.

And using a Dutch auction, we can naturally find the MEV bot. That is the best, most suited MEV bot for that one particular job. that is better than all the other MEV bots for that one particular job to fulfill your order at the best possible price. And the mechanism that allows for this is by not actually hard coding and entering this on chain, but allowing this to be just broadcasted across the landscape of MEV bots and saying, hey, I have this desire for this thing to happen. I will pay the minimum amount necessary according to the most efficient MEV bot that can execute this order to get this job done. And so you invert the relationship between MEV trying to eat you and MEV being a service provider for you.

You've got this analogy of like Polytrades from from Dune riding the sandworm here. And you say instead of fighting MEV bot monsters, we ride them. It's basically what you're doing is you're using all of these sandworms essentially. And you're using them for your own purposes when normally they just want to kind of eat you and steal your lunch. Instead, you're kind of harnessing the power of these things to. give you the best price on a trade. And that's all UniswapX is, essentially. So what are the implications of this, David?

Like, how does this change the landscape? It seems like now we can start to fulfill these types of orders off chain. Does that have an impact on, you know, how much liquidity is actually on chain? Does that create kind of a stealth non-mempool style transaction? action market? Like, is this good? Is it bad? What are the implications of scaling, right? How many transactions per second can this thing support? Have you given any thoughts to these things? So, yeah, there's a number of like second, third order consequences. I think the easiest one to understand is that you actually don't need to spend gas anymore. The gas cost of your transaction

just comes as a spread. And so it's just part of the USDA that you pay to buy you. your ether, you're just going to get a slightly less amount of ether because the gas cost is a part of the calculus that the MEV bot does when they are looking at your order. But the point is if you're just trading two tokens

that aren't ether, you will trade tokens and the ether balance in your wallet will stay the same. Because you are not the one spending gas. The MEV monster is. The MEV bot is. Gas is spent. An equivalent amount. Actually, less gas will be spent

per transaction because we don't have to load up all of those like hard-coded parameters in order to get this done. And so the average swap on Ethereum is actually going to become more efficient because of this. And that's the first reason why the average swap on Ethereum will become more gas-efficient. The second one is that part of the competition for M-EV bots is to actually aggregate intents. And so say you intend to buy one ether for 2,000 USC and someone else is meant to intends to sell one ether also for U2000 USDC. In the current example of in the current meta, you would have both buyer and seller line up at the uniswap desk and they would each take their bucket and scoop liquidity out of the USC pool

and put it back into the ether pool. And then the next person would come and they would take the same size bucket and they would take it out of the ether pool and put it back into the USC pool. both cost gas, both got arbed by MEV bots, and both happened in two separate transactions that were both on-chain. If they were both intense instead of on-chain signed orders, an MEV bot would be able to match these two orders together and just like cancel each other out? And almost like no gas costs between the two of them

because they can each, they just can just pay each other. And so like all of the aggregation of intense can kind of like, you know, like remember in algebra, where you have like things above the line and below the line and you like cross off the variable above the line and below the line if they're equivalent variables, kind of like that. That's what you can do with intense

because they haven't settled on chain yet. So an MEV bot can aggregate many, many, many different intents together and they can cancel a lot of the coincidence of wants between intents out before going on to Ethereum and settling up in one gigantic settlement that disturbs a bunch of liquidity pools. So instead of having 10,000 transactions, disturb Ethereum's liquidity pool 10,000 times,

an MEVBot can aggregate 10,000 intents, cancel out, like, most of them, and then just disturb Ethereum's liquidity pools in aggregate of the 10,000 transactions, which would be like, I don't know, one-hundredth the amount of disturbances across Ethereum's liquidity pools that would otherwise be the case.

Did all of that make sense? It does. Yeah, you say this in your article, with intense, a lot of the complexities between cross-chain liquidity, chain swapping, and bridge selection are all choices that will be made by the technical backend service providers, by essentially these MEV bots are making that choice. Am I reading that correctly? And all users have to do is hop on the ship and enjoy the ride. So this makes this multi-chain ecosystem a lot easier for users to navigate.

This really shifts the role of like what I thought, what we thought, collectively under the old, you know, paradigm bridges were for, right? Because then, like, you don't need bridges for as many things, do you? As long as you have kind of the trustless bridge between main net and a ruleup, that's kind of the bridge you need to preserve. A lot of the, you know, moving of assets from one chain to the other can happen in this M.EV bot world, in these off-chain orders, with these intent-based orders. Is that right? Yeah, 100%. So it really puts the synchronicity back into Ethereum, where every single layer two is an asynchronous network, but the MEV bots work to make them all synchronous networks.

Once again, they synchronize the state, the state of liquidity across all of these layer twos, and people, experts are, you know, work for margins in order to get that done. And so these are like this off-chain meta of off-chain M-EV bots is like this other part of Ethereum that's not actually the Ethereum protocol, is not the estate of Ethereum. But it's the swarm of MEV that makes sure that all of Ethereum's liquidity and state is synchronous across chains, even if there's like a few block time delays between any individual chain. Okay. So what does this paradigm shift, I guess, in closing, really, really mean moving forward? I think there's more to unpack in this rabbit hole.

And we certainly haven't unpacked everything today. I think a lot of the, you know, the bankless episodes in the future will be sort of going deeper down this rabbit hole. obviously order-based exchanges are going to change, right? So less on-chain sorts of orders and transactions, more off-chain. We've already talked about bridges. It seems like these off-chain orders aren't subject to the constraints of transactions per second on Ethereum mainnet or a roll-up either. So do we have like infinity transactions per second out there?

there's also a conversation about like centralization. Is this kind of a centralizing force? Is this sort of, are we losing the transparency of our on-chain markets? What do you think we have to unpack still in this intense-based conversation? Yeah, the convergence of these players, these off-chain players, is like the convergence between MEV experts and market makers. So like tech and capital, how those, how these landscapes converge is going to to be interesting.

How much we can actually squeeze into one of these things. So like I said, you can put like 10,000 intents together and then compress them down with efficiency and computation, off-chain computation, aka your CPU and some market maker MeeVBot's house office, wherever. Like, so like, yeah, you can get a lot of scale out of this. One of the cool ways that tech scales, to use another metaphor, the original, if you look at the original Xbox games. The graphics sucked.

And then if you looked at the late stage Xbox games, graphics were like orders of magnitude better, but it was the same hardware. How did that happen? It's because the software got better. And so this is the software of Ethereum layer, improving what we can do with the hardware layer of Ethereum. And so we're scaling transactions per second

in a pseudo way, in a roundabout way, that way through intents by allowing like a thousand intents to come together and represent the same size of like what would have ultimately been just like five or six normal swap transactions. So that's a whole other rabbit hole is like what kind of scale do we get out of this thing? How layer two's relate to this and how fast can the MEV swarm sync up a layer two to a layer one is another vertical to explore. And I bet you there's so much more.

It's a very large field. It totally is. And I think there's a lot of investable opportunities that you could find here around sort of how the MEV supply chain, the block builder supply chain is going to completely change how all of these orders are going to be aggregated, what this means for the future of exchanges. If you actually want to go use intents today, I don't think Uniswop X is live. It's not live by default. You can go and set it to live and you can make some phrase on Uniflux. Ah, okay. And there's, there's, of course, cow swap as well. That's at swap.com.fI.

And it's basically when you put a transaction, when you put an intent in, that's how. actually the MEV bots that are fulfilling that are filling that transaction so you can see how it works that way. So a lot more on this in the future. David, is there anything else you'd end with? Or did we cover it here? I'm sure there's going to be more articles that are continuations of this. And so stay tuned for that. I hope you liked the episode, Bankless Nation. We've got some action items for you, including David's article, a Hitchhiker's Guide to Writing the MEVBot. There's also some episodes that we've done previously on UniswapX, one with Dan Robinson that you absolutely have to go check out. We'll include those in the show notes. As always, got to let you know,

crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, 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.