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Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why?

Authors Burak Öz , Danning Sui , Thomas Thiery , Florian Matthes

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Author Details

Burak Öz
  • Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany
Danning Sui
  • Flashbots, San Francisco, CA, USA
Thomas Thiery
  • Ethereum Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal
Florian Matthes
  • Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany

Acknowledgements

We thank The Latest in DeFi Research (TLDR) program, funded by the Uniswap Foundation, for supporting this work. Special thanks to Flashbots and Eden for generously providing data. We also express our gratitude for the valuable comments of our reviewers and feedback by Julian Ma, Xin Wan, Christof Ferreira Torres, Kevin Pang, Žan Knafelc, and Tesa Ho.

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Burak Öz, Danning Sui, Thomas Thiery, and Florian Matthes. Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why?. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 22:1-22:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.22

Abstract

The MEV-Boost block auction contributes approximately 90% of all Ethereum blocks. Between October 2023 and March 2024, only three builders produced 80% of them, highlighting the concentration of power within the block builder market. To foster competition and preserve Ethereum’s decentralized ethos and censorship resistance properties, understanding the dominant players' competitive edges is essential. In this paper, we identify features that play a significant role in builders' ability to win blocks and earn profits by conducting a comprehensive empirical analysis of MEV-Boost auctions over a six-month period. We reveal that block market share positively correlates with order flow diversity, while profitability correlates with access to order flow from Exclusive Providers, such as integrated searchers and external providers with exclusivity deals. Additionally, we show a positive correlation between market share and profit margin among the top ten builders, with features such as exclusive signal, non-atomic arbitrages, and Telegram bot flow strongly correlating with both metrics. This highlights a "chicken-and-egg" problem where builders need differentiated order flow to profit, but only receive such flow if they have a significant market share. Overall, this work provides an in-depth analysis of the key features driving the builder market towards centralization and offers valuable insights for designing further iterations of Ethereum block auctions, preserving Ethereum’s censorship resistance properties.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Economics of security and privacy
Keywords
  • Block Building Auction
  • Proposer-Builder Separation
  • Maximal Extractable Value

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