Ethereum developers recently met to examine potential solutions to issues that may come from the merger as the ethereum merger date draws nearer. Alex Stokes, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, voiced worry about a potential MEV-boost bug that would interfere with relayers’ ability to connect with one another and obstruct the blockchain’s orderly addition.
The transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is anticipated to occur the week of September 19 thanks to Ethereum. On July 28, Ethereum developers had their 92nd consensus layer conference call, during which they talked about some potential solutions to issues that might result from the merger.
The orderly addition of the blockchain may be disrupted, but it shouldn’t delay the merger, according to Coindesk, which noted that Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes expressed concerns about a potential MEV-boost failure at the meeting. This could affect the way relayers (intermediaries between block builders and validators) communicate with one another.
Maximum Extractable Value (MEV), which describes how miners (under PoW), block builders, and validators (under PoS), insert or rearrange blocks within a block to increase revenue from transactions, includes MEV-boost.
MEV-boost is an intermediary layer created to prevent MEV centralization. It enables validators to request blocks from the network, and after merging, users will send their transactions through the blockchain to the block builder. MEV-boost is distinguished by collecting these blocks and giving them to validators, who then choose and suggest the most profitable blocks to the Ethereum network.
The entire PoS blockchain will be destroyed if MEV-boost fails. A string of validator nodes running MEV-boost will be blocked as long as the relayer commits even a little error, which prevents the block from being produced at the proper moment. omission. This can occur when a relayer neglects to alert a validator to suspicious activity, preventing the validator from proposing a block.
Next, the subsequent set of validators suffer damage, and if they submit a block that has already engaged a malicious relayer, the same issue persists and block creation is permanently halted.
Potential remedies
There is a proposal from a developer that mentions the potential for adding circuit breakers, which can be as easy as writing code to tell validators that they will automatically shut down if a block is missed. However, this is also a risky move because a validator may purposefully prevent blocks from being proposed, providing an incentive for that validator to monopolize MEV revenue by deceiving other validators.
The MEV-boost developer Flashbots team is working on developing some sort of open monitoring system for MEV activity, and Ben Edgington, head of product for Teku, ConenSys’ ETH 2.0 client, said: “Indicates that there are several correct solutions to the MEV-boost problem.” Other developers have also suggested that repeaters can be monitored via third-party dashboards.
Although Alex Stokes emphasized that the likelihood of EVM-boost failure is extremely low, he is still pushing for specific solutions to prevent accidents. He said the developers are considering options to let users wait for the merge to finish before attempting to use the builder or to introduce some sort of circuit breaker.
