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Flashbots Research Fellowship

Updated: 25.11.2020

The Flashbots Research Fellowship is a grants program to support high-quality research on miner-extractable value (MEV). The program runs from late Nov 2020 to March 2021 and is open to anyone from the community to apply to.

What does it mean to be a Research Fellow?
As a research fellow, you are the owner of research questions we’ve outlined on our research roadmap. You will shape their development, coordinate with research contributors on individual FRPs and collaborate with the core Flashbots research team on writing academic papers.

We expect the research questions to evolve over time and to most likely lead to more questions rather than answers. A Fellow should be comfortable working independently, leading research directions for others to follow and be familiar with the standards and rigour required for academic research.

How much is the grant?
The grant is $10-20k per fellowship for you or your organization. The grants will be paid in two installments, the first installment at the time of MEV Fellows selection announcement, the remainder at the end of the program.

What are the research questions available for Fellowship?

  1. How can we build a ‘good’ auction mechanism for validator priority ‘bribes’?
  2. What does a formal mathematical definition look like for a good auction mechanism?
  3. How can we leverage existing auction literature to create a mempool auction theory?
  4. How would such a mechanism differ across chain architectures and across layers?
  5. Should we build a ‘good’ auction mechanism for validator priority ‘bribes’?
  6. How do we minimize possible user harm of priority bribe incentives?
  7. How do we minimize possible consensus harms of priority bribe incentives?
  8. Should we allow for any MEV on the system? Should we bound the MEV? (Do you think there are worthy Research Questions for Paper 1 and 2 that is currently not on this list? Create a Gitub Issue in this repository, and explain why you think the answer to the research question is absolutely crucial at this stage, and why it merits to be a standalone Research Question independent from the remaining question.)

Aside from financial support, does Flashbots support fellows in other ways?
As a Research Fellow, you will have full access to the Flashbots core team as well as Flashbots contributors who will be able to help you depending on their bandwidth. Additionally, you will have access to our monitoring and tech infrastructure which includes an Ethereum full archival node with regular Parity RPC API with tracing and archive features enabled, and a MEV-Geth node that you’ll be able to use for testing the Flashbots bundles.

What’s the point of running this program?
Flashbots is an open research organization, this program is a first step at building a sustainable open research community. We see this fellowship as a funnel for talent that may be interested in working with us in the future for long term collaboration, on either part-time, or full-time basis and a social experiment in collective research coordination. In the longer term, we are aiming to build a self-sustaining research organization where all its work is made available to the public for anyone to benefit from and contribute to. Read more about who we are and our public commitments here.

How to apply
Send us an email at [email protected] with more information about your interest and your competencies that make you a good candidate to be a research fellow. That being said, the best way to show your skills is to directly contribute to FRPs by suggesting edits or starting discussions as issues.