Lido on Ethereum: Call for Relay Providers

Node Operators
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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.

Assuming the model related to Lido Node Operator’s use of relays presented in the Draft for Lido on Ethereum Block Proposer Rewards Policy, two lists of MEV-Boost relays will be maintained (one “must-include list” and one “allow list”).

  • 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:

  1. publicly available,
  2. publicly listed & maintained,
  3. open source,
  4. transparent about what (if any) transaction or address filtering they enforce.

Lido is seeking to expand the list of options available to NOs. 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.

UPDATED
As of Feb 10, 2023, the relay list is maintained on chain in the relevant contract (“MEV Boost Relay Allowed List”) the address for which can be found in the Deployed Contracts docs page. Relays can be obtained by NOs by querying this contract’s get_relays() method.

A full list of Relay Providers and Relays which have applied to Lido for vetting and their status can be found in the public page for the Relay Maintenance Committee.

EDITS:
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)
10 Feb 2023 - Updated to reflect that as of Feb 10, 2023, the relay list is maintained on-chain.

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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.

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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”.

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Hello. I’m Leo, from the Flashbots team.

We are interested in working with Lido, of course :slight_smile:

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:

:heavy_check_mark: publicly available
:heavy_check_mark: publicly listed & maintained
:heavy_check_mark: open source
:heavy_check_mark: 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.

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Daniel here from bloXroute.

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:

  1. Max profit: Relay that provide blocks with all available transactions/bundles with no filtering.
  2. 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.
  3. Regulated: Relay that provide blocks with all available transactions/bundles except the ones sent from/to wallet addresses that are sanctioned by OFAC.

Those three relays are live and ready for validators to register. You can find more details and instructions on how to connect to our relays at our MEV Relay Instructions for Validators - bloXroute Documentation

Ethereum Mainnet:

  • Max profit relay
  • Ethical relay
  • Regulated relay

Goerli:

  • Max profit relay

Ropsten:

  • Max profit relay
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Hello! I’m Dan from Blocknative.

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:

  1. Our public relays are available to all Ethereum users.
  2. Our public relays are actively maintained and can currently be accessed at the following endpoints:
  • Mainnet: https://0x9000009807ed12c1f08bf4e81c6da3ba8e3fc3d953898ce0102433094e5f22f21102ec[email protected]
  • Goerli : https://0x8f7b17a74569b7a57e9bdafd2e159380759f5dc3ccbd4bf600414147e8c4e1dc6ebad[email protected]
  • Rospten: http://0xaef7ec27ca8ca24205aab89f6595a5ad60d649c533fd7e7be692c9bd02780a93b68ada[email protected]
  1. 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!

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Manifold Finance: SecureRpc.com

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.

Relay connection information

Homestead is Ethereum Mainnet

homestead 1 https://mainnet-relay.securerpc.com/ https://0x98650451ba02064f7b000f5768cf0cf4d4e492317d82871bdc87ef841a074[email protected]/
goerli 5 https://goerli-relay.securerpc.com/ https://0x8a72a5ec3e2909fff931c8b42c9e0e6c6e660ac48a98016777fc63a73316[email protected]/

https://mainnet-relay.securerpc.com

https://0x98650451ba02064f7b000f5768cf0cf4d4e492317d82871bdc87ef841a07[email protected]

Resources

Status page

Documentation

Block Construction Policies

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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.

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Great question, you can find our policy on content moderation and filtering here: Network Filtering and Policies | Manifold Finance Knowledgebase

Short answer: no
long answer: still no.

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Hi Everyone,

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 – :ok:!

  • Publicly listed & maintained –:ok:!

  • Open source – :ok:! [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 – :ok:! 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).
    • Eden Network is fully committed to transparency. Eden Relay supports data transparency via Data API endpoint as described in the official Relay API spec: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

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/

Ethereum Mainnet:

Goerli:

Clients supported:

  • Lighthouse, ready
  • Prysm, ready
  • Teko, ready - documentation will be added soon
  • Nimbus, ready - documentation will be added soon
  • Lodestar, ready - documentation will be added soon

We look forward to working together with the Lido community on what we believe will be very exciting times for the Ethereum community as a whole.

Feel free to reach out on our discord channels or DM’s with any questions or comments.

Thank you.

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Link to our relay library on github : GitHub - eden-network/mev-boost-relay

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Hey everyone. Gnosis just announced a new relay: it is a simple fork of the flashbots relay that does not apply any block filtering.

  1. publicly available,
    yes, check out: https://agnostic-relay.net/
  2. publicly listed & maintained,
    public announcement: https://twitter.com/GnosisDAO/status/1597940022660894721
  3. open source:
    github. com/gnosis/mev-boost-relay
  4. filtering
    no filtering

Right now Agnosic Relay is only available on mainnet. A goerli version will come soon.

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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.

Announcement: https://twitter.com/ultrasoundmoney/status/1597939734088908800
Mainnet: https://relay.ultrasound.money
Goerli: https://relay-stag.ultrasound.money

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.

  1. Publicly available :white_check_mark:
    Our relay is open to all
  2. Publicly listed and maintained :white_check_mark:
  3. Open source :white_check_mark:
    We are running flashbots/mev-boost-relay for the relay and relayooor/go-ethereum for block validators
  4. No filtering :white_check_mark:
    We do not apply any block filtering
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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!

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Thanks Izzy :partying_face:. That was fast :clap:.

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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.

Announcement: Introducing the Aestus Relay. The Aestus MEV-Boost Relay is a… | by Aestus Relay | Dec, 2022 | Medium
Website, w/ links to mainnet and Goerli relays: https://www.aestus.live/

  1. Publicly available: All connections are permissionless and connection URLs are publicly available.
  2. Publicly listed and maintained: See above links and our public Twitter.
  3. Open source: Fork of Flashbots’ mev-boost-relay and supporting utilities, all available under our Github organization.
  4. Filtering: None, more details in our announcement and on our website.

Will add more direct links if that becomes an option!

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Update from the Agnostic relay team (cc @koeppelmann), their goerli relay is up and has been added to the OP.

https://0xa6bcad37b5d647152a93c2807d8a56055f1e0d7480eb6505d46edc2159[email protected]

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The RMC has reviewed the relays which have applied so far and come up with its first set of suggestions for codifying the existing relays in use and the new relays on mainnet.

Please check the post here!

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As mentioned in our discord announcement we are sunsetting our ethical relay due to the cross relay registration from over 99% of the registered validators losing the purpose of the relay.

We plan on doing a safe roll over for it so that there is zero down time to any validators or node operators but you are encouraged to remove the ethical relay from your mev-boost startup params.

For more information please check our discord announcement linked below.

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Thanks Ben, really appreciate the update here.

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