As Lido has begun to determine its upcoming MEV Policy, conversations have taken place with a number of prospective relay providers interested in serving Lido Node Operators.
This post seeks to 1. Solicit interest from prospective relay providers interested in working with the Lido protocol and 2. Refine Lido’s policy related to relays through collaborative discussion with prospective providers and DAO stakeholders.
Based on possible operational risks posed by the relays in the currently available implementation of MEV-Boost, we suggest that the DAO consider a policy that protects stakers and Node Operators from possible malicious behaviour by leveraging lists of “trusted” relay providers.
The “must-include list” of relays will be DAO-vetted relays that are considered trustworthy, well-operated, and reliable.
The “allow list” of relays will be DAO-approved, but perhaps less well-known or battle-tested relays which can be trialled prior to inclusion in the “must-include list”.
Both of these lists will be accessible to the public and amendable (in case relays should be considered for addition, e.g. via public request, or relays should be removed e.g. for bad performance).
As a starting point, it is highly suggested that relays considered for inclusion in these lists must be:
publicly available,
publicly listed & maintained,
open source,
transparent about what (if any) transaction or address filtering they enforce.
As of now, Node Operators for Lido on Ethereum are currently testing relays from:
Lido is seeking to expand the list of options available for testing. Suitable relays will be eligible for use by Lido Node Operators on Goerli to test and compare performance.
In this thread, we would like to call on all relay providers interested in working with Lido to publicly affirm their interest, provide background information on their organization and strategy, explain why Lido should approve their relay for one of the two lists, and contribute to the discourse regarding Lido’s relay policy.
EDIT:
08 Dec 2022 - Updated goerli relay details for Eden
08 Dec 2022 - Ultrasound.money goerli relay details added (mainnet will be added once it has been sufficiently tested)
13 Dec 2022 - Aestus goerli relay details added (mainnet will be added once it has been sufficiently tested)
One note on the open-source requirement for relays: since the relay code runs on a third- party computer (a server) not a public one (like a blockchain), you can never be sure that the code used in production is the same that was open-sourced. I think it’s still healthy to demand relays open-source their internal auction logic but it’s not a property that buys you a lot in practice, so I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it.
Yep, open sourcing the code is more about principle and making it easier for others who wish to provide similar services to be able to do so (e.g. to encourage relays to easily add compatibility with API spec which is needed for our monitoring as easy as possible). The combination of open source relay code (so that we can see how relay “should” work) + data transparency (i.e. relays publishing information about the bids they receive and send to validators) fills in the gaps in terms of assessing whether the relay is working “as it is supposed to be”.
Our mainnet relay is ready for validators to register:
We are working on a definition of trusted relay, making sure that our relay complies with everything in that list of requirements, and talking to other relay and validator node operators to reach an agreement. Please take a look here:
publicly available publicly listed & maintained open source transparent about what (if any) transaction or address filtering they enforce: Flashbots filters transactions that interact with OFAC sanctioned addresses. More details here as we get more legal clarifications.
Glad to work with Lido. Honored to be one of the first two relay providers. Salute to Flashbots at the same time.
At bloXroute, we will provide three types of MEV relays for Ethereum Mainnet, in order to serve the various needs of different validators.
publicly available – Yes!
publicly listed & maintained – Yes!
open source – Planning to open source in 1-2 months.
transparent about what (if any) transaction or address filtering they enforce – Yes! See below for more explanation.
Here are the definitions and the difference between the three different relays:
Max profit: Relay that provide blocks with all available transactions/bundles with no filtering.
Ethical: Relay that provide blocks that have no frontrunning bundles. bloXroute tries its best to filter out MEV bundles that execute strategies like generalized frontrunning and sandwiching.
Regulated: Relay that provide blocks with all available transactions/bundles except the ones sent from/to wallet addresses that are sanctioned by OFAC.
We’re excited at the possibility of working with Lido! Blocknative has recently released public relays to further contribute to the reliability and diversity of the builder network. By maintaining highly reliable, realtime blockchain infrastructure over the past four years, we’ve learned a lot and would love to bring that experience to Lido’s relay network to help ensure the safety of Ethereum.
Our relay documentation goes into much more detail, but to answer your starting points:
Our public relays are available to all Ethereum users.
Our public relays are actively maintained and can currently be accessed at the following endpoints:
We open sourced our relay yesterday! GitHub - blocknative/dreamboat: alpha mev-boost relay Blocknative’s initial relay service will serve blocks that meet the OFAC compliance requirements of our early customers. We are monitoring the ecosystem in real time and will adjust to less filtering as soon as it makes sense.
We would love to collaborate on ways to help further refine Lido’s policies and ensure a safe and reliable relay network. We will post additional information regarding our relay on our blog soon, which I am happy to share when available. We look forward to participating in future discussions!
We herby affirm our interest in providing the entire Ethereum community censorship resistant, performant and robust MEV Relay and Block building services.
SecureRpc services some of the largest firms in the space, like Alameda Research and Wintermute.
We focus on improving trade execution quality and settlement for end users, this includes providing several new RPC methods that will be made available to Lido DAO members.
Does manifold also filter the transactions from OFAC sanctioned addresses. If not, its really important to consider manifold for lido node providers given that all rest of providers are not censorship resistant.
Happy Merge Day! and thanks for taking the time to review and consider our proposition.
We are excited to present the Eden Relay to the Lido community and support the Lido community with a reliable relay.
Eden operates an MEV-Boost-compatible relay (Eden Relay) supported by its own first-party block builders and in the near future will allow third party builders to connect and transmit through the relay.
Key bullets :
Publicly available – !
Publicly listed & maintained –!
Open source – ! [Clickable link to library will be added in replies]
Fully transparent transaction/block proposal flow. No censorship except that of which is required by law – ! See below for more details.
Eden Relay provides blocks with transactions/bundles prepared by our own Eden Block Builder that is set up to always ensure regulatory compliance and respect all applicable regulations, including the OFAC sanction list (meaning no wallet addresses allowed through if they have been registered on the OFAC list).
All third party builders supplying transactions/bundles will need to accept ToS that disallow them to share transactions/bundles that have been sanctioned by OFAC (This will be enforced and penalized by removal/blacklisting of block builder if detected).
Our Eden Relay is running and ready for validators to start registering. You can find more details and instructions on how to connect to our relays at: https://docs.edennetwork.io/
Hi, I’m Alex from the ultrasound.money team. Last week we announced our permissionless and neutral relay with the goal of helping improve relay diversity.
We’re very excited about the prospect of onboarding Lido node operators to our relay, as it would perfectly fit our mission to act as a public good in the ecosystem.
Publicly available
Our relay is open to all
Publicly listed and maintained
Open source
We are running flashbots/mev-boost-relay for the relay and relayooor/go-ethereum for block validators
Hey Alex, welcome! I’ve bumped your user trust level, please check if you can now edit the links into your post. Great to hear that the relay is already available on Goerli. I will add the details to the OP and Lido node operators can start testing it out on Goerli!
Hi, The Aestus relay team would like to offer up our relay for your consideration. Aestus is a neutral, non-censoring block relay that developed out of conversations between members of the EthFinance and EthStaker communities who see the need to develop credibly neutral architecture for the Ethereum staking ecosystem.
publicly available
!
. That was fast 
.