Motivation

• Gas prices are unpredictable
  • Users don’t know how much they are going to pay
  • Miners don’t know how much revenue they can expect
• MEV has exploded over the past year and we need better ways to capture it

Existing solutions

• Oiler
  • Viable as a price hedge, but not when actual delivery is desired
  • Physical futures are more foundational
  • Relies on oracles
• Flashbots
  • Does not solve the unpredictable gas price problem
  • Does not avoid over-bidding either since competition is ingrained at all levels
    • searchers compete with each other
    • mempool transactions still compete with bundles
    • bundles from other solutions like flashbots compete
  • Relies on SGX to maintain privacy
  • Vulnerable to transaction bundles getting exposed in uncle blocks
  • Vulnerable to spam/DoS since failed bundles don’t cost anything
  • Restricted to payments to coinbase as a means of paying for bundles, does not fit all use cases as is

Components

• Futures contract
  • Supply-side listing
  • Demand-side buying
  • Trading
  • Dispute resolution
• High block frequency chain for timestamping
  • Initially, centralized server
• Delivery
  • ?? Mining software is an unknown here
  • We can write our own, but miners aren’t gonna use it
    • mev-geth indicates we can write our own and still get adoption
  • Have to research what’s in use currently and how we can integrate
    • probably mev-geth fork

Futures specification

• Miner M
• Block range [B_start, B_end]
  • Initially, fixed ranges of 1000 blocks (~4 hours)
• Position + Gas limit L
  • Initially, fixed chunks of 21k gas
  • Allow any position as a possibility
• Minimum block production guarantee B_rate
  • Serves as maximum number of tx allowable against this future
• Gas price G
• Premium P

Supply side

• Miner provisions futures supply in contract