DEX trading is often associated with risks, ranging from non-reversible payments to MEV bots attacks. As the crypto community strives to make digital assets more ubiquitous, innovative solutions are emerging to ensure the safety of users’ funds.

We decompose the slot into the beacon round and the execution round during which the beacon block and execution block are proposed respectively. Each of the two blocks has an associated attesting committee that casts votes used to determine the head of the chain.

Maximal extractable value (“MEV”) is defined as the value that block proposers (miners or validators) can extract from a blockchain by using their ability to order, insert and censor transactions within the blocks that they produce.

Layer-2 EVM protocols on top of Ethereum, including optimistic rollups and ZK rollups, depend on EVM verification. However, this requires them to trust a large codebase, and if there is a bug in that codebase, these VMs risk getting hacked. Additionally, it means even ZK-EVMs that want to stay exactly equivalent to the L1 EVM need to have some form of governance, to copy changes to the L1 EVM into their own EVM implementation.

Blockchain infrastructure company Blocknative has released a new tool called ethernow.xyz, which examines the "mempool" of pending transactions on Ethereum. The tool is designed to help reduce instances of block-level manipulation and protect users from front-running bots. It is also intended to help researchers understand why certain transactions fail or succeed, and how they are added to certain blocks. The tool was made possible through a grant from the Ethereum Foundation and was presented at the Columbia CryptoEconomics Workshop in New York. Blocknative underwent a restructuring in October, resulting in a reduction of a third of its headcount.

Jito Labs, the developer of MEV infrastructure on the Solana ecosystem, announced that the JTO airdrop redemption window will open at 11:00 AM Eastern Time on December 7, 2023 (the token generation date), corresponding to 12:00 AM Beijing Time on December 8. Starting from the token generation date, any eligible airdrop recipients can claim their JTO tokens within 18 months.

Jito Labs, the developer of Solana's MEV infrastructure, introduced the eligibility and distribution rules for its airdrop. Of the 10% airdrop share (100 million JTO), 15% (15 million coins) will be allocated to Jito-Solana validators, 5% (5 million coins) will be allocated to Jito MEV searchers, and 80% (80 million coins) will be allocated to JitoSOL users (who hold at least 100 points before November 25, 2023). Currently, users can verify their Solana wallet address eligibility, and after the airdrop goes live, they can start the JTO token claiming process on the official website.

Bockchain analyst ZachXBT tweeted that MEV engineer PokerBrat raised at least $1.2 million from 11 people earlier this year for various MEV robots (independent of Rampage) and claimed that the robots would be put into use soon. However, after initially agreeing to return the funds due to numerous release delays, PokerBrat made various excuses, including COVID-19, health issues, exchange issues, extortion, and family problems.

Solana engineer Jac0xb.sol announced the launch of the Lighthouse Solana project, which is a personal project aimed at addressing common issues such as MEV (Miner Extractable Value) attacks and sandwich attacks, allowing for white hat detection of Solana programs. Lighthouse provides support to developers by enabling judgments on account balances and account statuses. This ensures that transactions comply with predefined conditions and have use cases such as protecting signer assets and maintaining transaction integrity.

According to an official blog post, Nethermind and Flashbots have proposed an Alternate PBS based on Rollups. This PBS allows MEV revenue generated by Rollups to be obtained by the Rollup itself instead of being paid to the proposal submitter on the sorting chain. Alternate PBS also addresses another problem related to stealing Rollup blocks. Proposal submitters on the sorting chain can observe the basic Rollup blocks built by unsuccessful Rollup builders and rebuild these blocks for themselves without careful construction. This allows proposal submitters on the sorting chain to receive the value of building blocks without the cost of building (only copying).