We are entering a situation where crypto has value just because its crypto. There are no real fundamental properties, just a bunch of users associated with a crypto, and therefore it has value
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It's a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as people believe the promises, hop on top of the liquid early-stage tokens and drive the market cap up. This kind of explains why the market is at elevated prices compared to two years ago despite not much changing in many of the shitcoins.
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What is this metric?
This metric tracks the percentage of blocks built by OFAC compliant mev-boost relays since the Merge (as a percentage of mev-boost proposed blocks or all blocks).
The Ethereum Merge that occurred on September 15, 2022, has enabled the rise of mev-boost due to the wider distribution of block proposers compared to a small set of miners in charge of block production under PoW. Mev-boost is a service that Ethereum POS Validators have the option to run to outsource their block production duties to the highest bidder, effectively increasing their APR. When setting up mev-boost, Validators add to their config which relays they would like to accept blocks from.
What does that mean? Do the relays pay to propose a block?
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That's my understanding. The relays themselves make money through MEV which simply said is the process of ordering your own transactions between organic ones in such a way that you arbitrage/profit from it.
In the same way that Citadel pays for Robinhood's order flow in order to use high-frequency trading to profit off the known retail trades, these validators have arbitrageurs include transactions which exploit the public retail blockchain transactions (e.g a trade on Uniswap) in order to profit from that. One of the simplest ones is a dead-sandwich attack.
It's scandalous.
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MEV which simply said is the process of ordering your own transactions between organic ones in such a way that you arbitrage/profit from it.
Oh, wow, I heard first of MEV a long time ago but never looked into what it actually is.
This sounds exactly like "retail vs hedge funds" in tradfi (as you described with Robinhood and Citadel).
Yes, sounds very unethical, especially if it's done on a blockchain claiming to be the decentralized. They just enable the same stuff as before.
I have to look deeper into this, thanks for your explanation! You got me interested
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Now that I think more about it: Even the name "Robinhood" is similar and hilarious. It suggest to give power back to the people or to "rebel against tyranny" [1], but it's doing the exact opposite; exploiting retail even more.
[1]
In popular culture, the term "Robin Hood" is often used to describe a heroic outlaw or rebel against tyranny. -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood
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The rabbit hole goes deep :)
I was much into DeFi when I first heard about it - the theoretical idea is good but this current iteration is nothing close to it. It's re-designing centralized finance with a bit less obscurity but a lot more fake promises.
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