4 posts tagged with "sgx"

We are excited to announce that Flashbots is successfully running a block builder inside an SGX enclave, a trusted execution environment (TEE) developed by Intel. The SGX block builder is now live on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, and soon on mainnet!

Our previous work on running Geth inside SGX demonstrated the technical feasibility of this approach. Now, we’ve made the next step towards block building inside encrypted enclaves, and want to share our key learnings and challenges, as well as the all the code and tooling for running a block builder inside SGX.

At Flashbots, we are exploring trusted execution environments (TEEs) such as SGX, as well as other privacy technologies including Multi-Party Computation and Homomorphic Encryption, as important building blocks for trustless collaboration along the transaction supply chain. This is particularly relevant for applications such as decentralized block building and sharing private orderflow.

Today we are happy to publish our efforts and a number of key learnings about running Geth inside SGX, for others to reuse, experiment with, and build upon.

TLDR:

• After successfully isolating the centralizing effects of MEV to the block builder role, we turn ourselves toward a new challenge: to decentralize block building itself. Exclusive orderflow and cross-domain MEV present emerging centralization threats to all cryptocurrencies, so we must make sure to keep MEV decentralized, or the decentralization of crypto will be lost.
• To hold ourselves to our decentralization commitments, we are building SUAVE - the Single Unifying Auction for Value Expression.
• SUAVE unbundles the mempool and block builder role from existing blockchains and offers a highly specialized and decentralized plug-and-play alternative. Sharing the same sequencing layer allows crypto to stay decentralized, block builders to capture cross-domain MEV, validators to maximize their revenue, and users to transact with the best execution, while reducing the economic centralization pressure on each domain.
• We are building SUAVE in the open and invite all interested parties — users, wallets, searchers, builders, researchers, and blockchain developers — to work with us.

While Flashbots Alpha has been and continues to be successful it offers incomplete trust guarantees. It is not permissionless because miners who adopt it have to be whitelisted by MEV-Relay in order to be forwarded bundles. It is not completely private because bundles can be seen by miners prior to inclusion on-chain. Lastly, Flashbots Alpha offers no finality protection against chain reorgs. While finality is important, we are focusing first on permissionless and complete privacy as the next design goals to achieve.