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Introduction Figure: Solana REV; Jito Tips are colored in green. Source: Blockworks. Figure: Last 30 days trend, Solana REV; Jito Tips are colored in green. Source: Jito.network. Over the past year, Solana’s Real Economic Value (REV)—transaction fees plus out-of-protocol MEV tips—has soared to an all-time high of $1.4B. Much of that growt...

WORK IN PROGRESS Overview BuilderNet is a decentralized block building network for Ethereum that ensures transactions remain private and MEV value is fairly redistributed to users. It brings together globally distributed, open-source builder instances—currently operated by Flashbots, Beaverbuild, and Nethermind—to collaboratively assemble bloc...

Part 2: Multi-Stage Solana’s Transaction Supply Chain and Control-Theoretic Optimization Recap of Part 1 and Overview of Part 2 In Part 1, we established the foundational queueing-theory concepts that apply to blockchain fee markets: M/M/1 Queues: We examined single-server queues with Poisson arrivals and exponential service tim...

Part 1: Foundations of Queueing Theory for Solana’s Fee Markets Introduction Solana’s promise of fast, high-throughput blockchain operations relies on an efficient fee market that keeps the network stable even under heavy load. In traditional blockchains, a simple “bidding war” can prioritize transactions by fee, but Solana’s architecture invo...

Special thank yous to Terry and Fikunmi for reading early versions of this article and providing feedback. Introduction Solana is a high-throughput blockchain that aims to maintain full capacity utilization without artificially constraining blockspace. Unlike Ethereum—which relies on a dynamic base fee model (EIP-1559) that makes blockspace ex...

Overview In the previous article, we showed how slowing capital velocity and raising reserve requirements can help mitigate the spam without punishing ordinary users. Here we make those two levers adaptive and dynamic. Our guide is the study “Dynamical Analysis of the EIP-1559 Ethereum Fee Market1,” which says that fee mechanisms can tip from...

When cheap block-space backfires During Solana’s January 2022 congestion episode the success rate of ordinary user transactions fell by as much as 70% as arbitrage bots resubmitted identical orders thousands of times to maximize inclusion odds; the validator pipeline simply clogged and block production slowed to a crawl12. Polygon faced a diffe...

Introduction Maintaining censorship resistance (CR) is important to ensure the integrity, fairness, and decentralization of decentralized applications (dApps). Censorship resistance safeguards against malicious actors attempting to manipulate transaction processing, thereby preserving the foundational principles of blockchain systems. The Atla...