Motion: We should always reduce MEV on blockchains (Ed Felten vs. Tushar Jain)

Guests:

Ed Felten (twitter.com/edfelten)

Tushar Jain (twitter.com/TusharJain_)


Host:

Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)

Today’s motion is “We should always reduce MEV on blockchains."

Generally speaking, MEV or Miner Extractable Value is a way for miners to derive additional revenue by executing transactions based on information in the mem pool. For instance, say a miner notices a transaction in the mem pool waiting to be included in a block. Maybe this is a transaction to buy up some cheap Ethereum. The miner can execute that purchase themselves, at the expense of the trader that placed the original order. And of course, this means value got extracted by the miner, transferred from the original trader. This behavior pattern, of course, applies to both miners and validators. Or to all block producers, to be generic.

The question is, is MEV an inevitability of blockchain systems? Are there ways to reduce it? Are our resources better spent creating systems that reduce as much MEV as possible, or should we acknowledge their existence and try to distribute that MEV more fairly, or at least transparently?

Our two guests today include a layer-2 founder and a VC well-versed in this area. It will be a great discussion.

If you’re into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We’ve featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.

If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.

Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.


Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):

• https://pdaian.com/blog/mev-wat-do/
• https://multicoin.capital/2021/09/08/tokenizing-mev/
• https://medium.com/offchainlabs/meva-what-is-it-good-for-de8a96c0e67c
• https://docs.flashbots.net/flashbots-protect/overview

Guest bios:

Ed Felten is co-founder and chief scientist at Offchain Labs, the inventor of Arbitrum, a layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. He was previously a professor of Computer Science at Princeton, and before that the Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission as well as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House.

Tushar Jain is co-founder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital, one of the most successful crypto funds in the last cycle.