Relay Maintenance Committee - Feb 2023 Proposal

Proposals
1

The Relay Maintenance Committee recently reviewed the requests for inclusion into the mainnet Lido vetted relays list by three new relay operators:

  • Agnostic relay
  • Aestus relay
  • Ultra sound relay

The members of the RMC assembled, filled out, and reviewed an assessment template for each of the relays. The assessment template can be found here (note: the template was iteratively improved upon throughout the review process, so some elements were added or fine-tuned towards the end and may need small follow ups for completeness).

Assessment template

Application

  1. Has the relay operator posted in the Call for Relays thread with the information required for application?
    1. Is the relay operator publicly available?
    2. Is the relay publicly listed and maintained? If yes, please link to the dashboard/webpage.
    3. Is the relay open source? If yes, please link to the repository.
    4. Are there any ethical or non-neutral considerations about the relay to disclose? This includes MEV strategies such as transaction reordering or censorship such as address filtering and sanctions/legal compliance.
    5. How does the relay source from builders and searchers? (e.g. are they internal, external 3rd parties, publicly open, private, permissioned, permissionless)?
    6. What is the relay operator’s policy for at-fault technical mishaps which result in missed proposals?
    7. Do we have all the necessary disclosures and contact information about the relay operator?

Revenue

  1. How is the relay funded and/or sustained?
  2. What is the revenue/profit sharing model (if any) of the relay?
  3. Is this model transparently disclosed and well understood?

Testing

  1. Does the relay operator have a Goerli testnet relay?
  2. How many days have node operators tested this relay?
    1. Has the relay been tested for a minimum of two weeks?
  3. What was the success and failure rate of the relay’s proposed blocks?
  4. Were there any incident or degraded performance reports from Lido Node Operators while testing the relay? (e.g. missed proposals due to missing/late payloads, validator registration errors, relay timeouts, etc.)
  5. Were observed issues and incidents during testing investigated and resolved sufficiently in a timely manner?
  6. Are there considerations and data to be observed and included from mainnet performance?
  7. Has there been a report compiled to analyze the new relay with performance data on testnet and mainnet?

Based on the review performed by the RMC members, no objections were noted to adding all of the above relays to the “Allow list”. The full proposal of the RMC (to be reflected on-chain by the RMC by Feb 10, unless the community / DAO objects or has suggestions for improvement is):

Add below relays in “must use some list” (is_mandatory = True)

These relays are already being used on mainnet since the Merge and performance is acceptable.

Blocknative (Mainnet)
bloXroute Regulated (Mainnet)
bloXroute Ethical (Mainnet)
bloXroute Max-Profit (Mainnet)
Flashbots (Mainnet)
Eden Network (Mainnet)

Add below relays in “allow list” (is_mandatory= False)

These relays are new submissions or an existing relay that had an issue in the past and which may be undergoing infrastructural changes (improvements) in the near future.

Manifold SecureRPC (Mainnet)
Ultra Sound Relay (Mainnet)
Agnostic Relay (Mainnet)
Aestus Relay (Mainnet)

Should the relays added to the “allow list” continue to show good performance, a proposal will follow to move them up to the “must use some” list. The suggestion of the RMC is that Manifold remains in the “allow list” until the new iteration of the relay is released which will be based on a brand new and open codebase.

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For transparency:

There was yesterday a short incident with the Agnostic Relay:
We gave a public notice about it here:

Summary:

  • 22 blocks missed
  • we detected the issue within 2h and halted the relay to prevent further losses
  • 30min later restarted with a fix

Postmortem with cause and fixes attached.

7.04 ETH has been lost. In this case, we have decided to refund the affected validators.

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:tada:
Since the proposed discussion period passed with no objections, the RMC has executed the on-chain transaction to update the Lido MEV Boost Relay Allowed List contract with the proposed info (tx: Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan).

As a result, the get_relays() method now reads:

image
image1410Ă—621 48.5 KB

What does this mean for Node Operators
Node Operators are encouraged to use as many of the relays on this list as possible. Node Operators must use at least some of the relays (ideally all, if amenable to doing so, in order to promote relay+builder diversity) which have a flag of is_mandatory=True.

Additionally, Node Operators and Relay Operators are suggested to re-familiarize themselves with the expectations as detailed in the Block Proposer Rewards policy, especially sections:
Block Production and Relay Troubleshooting and Relay and Relay Operator Responsibilities.

Next steps
Should the relays added to the “allow list” continue to show good performance, a proposal will follow to move them up to the “must use some” list. Likewise, new relays operators are welcome to submit applications for consideration in the Lido on Ethereum: Call for Relay Providers thread.

7 Likes