Normal Science

Stablecoin sentences to ponder

Mr Bessent’s bullishness notwithstanding, this month his department released a proposal that would treat stablecoin issuers as financial institutions for the purposes of anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer laws. This means adopting the same onerous monitoring and compliance procedures as banks, adding to the cost of launching and managing a new coin. Here is more from Buttonwood at The Economist. The post Stablecoin sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Mind the Gap - Where TEE Attestations Fall Short and Why Do TEEs Need Proof of Cloud

Covering Proof of Cloud and motivating why it is needed and where it falls short and requires future extensions.

Network Anonymized Mempools

Introducing Flashnet, a new low-latency anonymous broadcast protocol for Ethereum's execution pipeline.

MEV and the Limits of Scaling

Today, we introduce a new thesis MEV has become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains.

Scalable Oblivious Accesses to Blockchain Data

Oblivious Labs + Flashbots

The First L2 TEE Block Builder is Live on Unichain Mainnet

We are excited to announce Unichain is the first L2 to release Rollup-Boost and deploy TEE block building on mainnet!

Migrating to BuilderNet

Block building must be made decentralized, uncensorable, and neutral. To accelerate decentralization in block building, Flashbots has deprecated our centralized block builders and migrated our orderflow and refunds to BuilderNet.

ZTEE - Trustless Supply Chains

Every distributed cryptographic protocol, key management system or wallet runs on opaque hardware. In almost all cases, we do not know with any certainty that our hardware is executing the expected program and that it is not actually acting against us. Many cases of exactly this kind of betrayal have been uncovered. The latest proved deadly. This precedent suggests the likely existence of undetected malicious hardware in use today.

Parallel block building

We introduce a new approach to block building called parallel block building. Instead of treating all transactions as potentially conflicting - as traditional sequential building algorithms do - parallel block building recognizes that most transactions in a block are actually independent. When a user swaps ETH for USDC, it doesn't affect someone minting an NFT - so why process them sequentially?

Zero Trust Execution Environments

Recent months have seen an awakening of several large use cases of TEEs, from OpenAI calling for new and improved TEEs and Apple announcing a hardware-based private cloud, to Ethereum transactions being privately processed in TDX and other blockchains leveraging SGX for integrity. Having worked quite closely with several use cases that are at the center of this excitement, we are aware of both the promise which secure hardware holds, and of the current insufficiency of today’s hardware to servic...

Mitigating MEV with FHE - Blind Arbitrage on Ethereum

This article examines the application of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) space. Our approach allows searchers to blindly backrun user transactions using FHE. This prototype demonstrates how a searcher can compute the future price of a UniswapV2 pool over a user transaction, keeping it encrypted throughout the process. Although this method is not currently practical for deployment, it serves as a foundation for future improvement and expansion, which we d...

Open sourcing rbuilder

An open and efficient block building ecosystem is essential to Ethereum. In order to catalyze further innovation and collaboration in block building, Flashbots has open sourced rbuilder, our latest and most performant block builder written in Rust, and designed to work with Reth.

Sirrah: Speedrunning a TEE Coprocessor

Get in losers, we are attaching a TEE to a blockchain. All in under 2k lines of code, mostly Solidity

Illuminating Ethereum's Order Flow Landscape

In this post, we cast light on the state of defi order and transaction flow today. We will show how defi has distinguished itself from the traditional order flow market, and discuss the challenges to achieving our shared dream of systems that remain decentralized while maximally benefiting the user.

THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS

PrefaceWhat if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish?What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction. The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored. Our friend Alap Shah posed the question, and together we brainstormed the answer. We wrote this part, and he’s written two others you can find here.Hopefully, reading this leaves you more prepared for potential left tail r...

Thematic Update: Modern Warfare

Over the past year, we’ve spent more and more time following the developments of the defense industry as a key thematic trend. Our foray into the landscape was with the creation of a Drone basket in our 25 Trades for 2025 – a bit of a flier on the “Drones over New Jersey!” panic of late 2024.But sometimes it’s the simplest observations that actually work the best. The Drones basket turned out to be one of our best performing trade ideas of the year, turbocharged by a chaotic run of geopolitical ...

My self-sovereign / local / private / secure LLM setup, April 2026

Plinko PIR tutorial

A GKR Tutorial

Memory access is O(N^[1/3])

The importance of full-stack openness and verifiability

My response to AI 2027

Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft

Does digital ID have risks even if it's ZK-wrapped?

A simple explanation of a/(b+c) + b/(c+a) + c/(a+b) = 4

The math of when stage 1 and stage 2 make sense

Simplifying the L1

Introducing EVMbench

Paradigm and OpenAI build EVMbench as an open evaluation framework that tests AI agents across detecting, patching, and exploiting vulnerabilities.

PACTs: Protecting Your Bitcoin From a Quantum Sunset

A possible way for Bitcoin holders to protect themselves from having their funds frozen in an emergency post-quantum hard fork—without having to publicly move their coins.

Releasing Reth 2.0!

Reth is now faster, smaller, and ready for the next frontier of crypto infrastructure.