2025 crypto reading list

home

-
  +
    *
      ~

- MEV/relays/PBS
  + link. "Pipelining-Only ePBS" by Lin
  + link. "Glamsterdam's Hidden Gem: EIP-7732" by Mark
  + link. "Optimistic MEV in Ethereum Layer 2s: Why Blockspace Is Always in Demand" by Ozan Solmaz et al.
  + link. "How Exclusive are Ethereum Transactions? Evidence from non-winning blocks" by Vabuk Pahari and Andrea Canidio
  + link. "EIP-7732 Amendment: Pipelining without Optionality" by Conor
  + link. "The Free Option Problem in ePBS, Part II" by Cristoph et al.
  + link. "The Free Option Problem in ePBS" by Cristoph et al.
  + link. "Builders and Relays in ePBS" by Titan
  + link. "MEV and the limits of scaling" by Bert Miller
  + link. "The role of relays in reorgs" by Data Always
  + link. "Proposer Commitments - A Validator's Case For Delegation" by Ladislaus
  + link. "The Block Auction Infrastructure Race" by Data Always
  + link. "Expanding Mempool Perspectives" by Toni
  + link. "Introduction to Optimistic V3 Relays" by George and Vlad
  + link. "Relay Inclusion Lists" by Michael and Kubi
  + link. "A trivial form of PBS: MEV Lock" by Potuz
  + link. "The Geography of Block Building" by DataAlways
  + link. "Dynamic Penalties for ePBS" by Christoph
  + link. "Trustless payments: right vibe, more trust?" by Alex
  + link. "Trustless payments" by Bruno, Christoph, Quintus, Boz, Luis
  + link. "An Observation on Ethereum's Blockspace Market" by Kubi, Alex, Kevin, Justin
  + link. "How the MEV Supply Chain Reacts to Circuit Breakers" by DataAlways
  + link. "A Consensus Layer Client Diversity Snapshot" by DataAlways

- prover markets
  + link. "Brevis ProverNet: the Open Marketplace for Zero-Knowledge Proofs" by Brevis Team
  + link. "An Ethereum Prover Market Proposal" by Julian Ma
  + link. "Shipping an L1 zkEVM #1: Realtime Proving" by Sophia Gold
  + link. "Scaling the L1 to Gigagas with Real-Time Proving" by Kshitij
  + link. "Prover Killers Killer: You Build it, You Prove it" by Julian, Kev
  + link. "Introducing Succinct Network: The Protocol for Programmable Truth" by Uma Roy 
  + link. "Succinct Network: Prove the World's Software" by Uma Roy et al. 
  + link. "Proof Market" by Mikhail Komarov 
  + link. "Taiko Protocol Overview" by Lisa Akselrod and Taiko Labs 
  + link. "Mechanism Design for ZK-Rollup Prover Markets" by Wenhao Wang
  + link. "EC'24 Workshop Talk: MEV, Blockspace Allocation and Tullock Contests" by Tim Roughgarden
  + link. "Proofs of Invalidity" by Julian

- consensus and execution separation
  + link. "Execution Consensus Separation" by Max Resnick
  + link. "Flow: Separating Consensus and Compute" by Alexander Hentschel et al.
  + link. "Flow: Separating Consensus and Compute - Execution Verification -" by Alexander Hentschel et al.
  + link. "Flow: Separating Consensus and Compute - Block Formation and Execution -" by Alexander Hentschel et al.
  + link. "Exploring Sophisticated Execution Proposers for Ethereum" by Julian Ma
  + link. "Proposal: Delay stateRoot Reference to Increase Throughput and Reduce Latency" by Charlie Noyes and Max Resnick
  + link. "Decoupling throughput from local building" by Barnabé Monnot
  + delayed execution
    * link. "Execution Dependencies" by Toni
    * link. "Delayed Execution And Skipped Transactions" by Toni
    * link. "Delayed Execution" by Francesco
  + rainbow staking
    * link. "Three-Tier staking (3TS) - Unbundling Attesters, Includers and Execution Proposers" by Thomas Thiery
    * link. "Paths to SSF revisited" by Barnabé

- consensus
  + link. "LMD GHOST with ~256 validators and a fast-following finality gadget" by Vitalik
  + link. "Finality Is in the Eye of the Behodler"  by Ittai, Vitalik, Luca 
  + link. "Consensus Under Adversary Majority Done Right"  by Srivatsan Sridhar et al. 
  + link. "Beyond 51% attacks: Precisely characterizing blockchain achievable resilience"  by Joachim Neu, Srivatsan Sridhar, Ertem Nusret Tas
  + link. "Better Safe than Sorry: Recovering after Adversarial Majority"  by Srivatsan Sridhar, Dionysis Zindros, and David Tse
  + link. "Kudzu: Fast and Simple High-Throughput BFT"  by Victor, Jakub, Yann
  + link. "Minimmit: Fast Finality with Even Faster Blocks"  by Brendan, Andy LP, Patrick O'Grady

- crypto-economic security
  + link. "Crosslink Design in a Nutshell" by Shielded Labs
  + link. "The Crosslink 2 Construction" by Shielded Labs
  + link. "Remote Staking with Optimal Economic Safety"  by Xinshu Dong et al.
  + link. "Cryptoeconomic Security for Data Availability Committees"  by Ertem Nusret Tas and Dan Boneh

- based/native rollups
  + link. "what happened to based sequencing? is sync. composability still a thing?" by Junger
  + link. "Improving Aztec Block Production" by Conor
  + link. "Unstoppable Sequencing: Permissionless Batching for Rollup Resilience" by Roger Podacter
  + link. "Understanding Based Rollups: PGA Challenges, Total Anarchy, and Potential Solutions" by Davide Rezzoli
  + link. "Native rollups—superpowers from L1 execution" by Justin Drake
  + link. "EIP-7917: Deterministic proposer lookahead" by Lin Oshitani

- censorship resistance
  + link. "IncluderSelect: Leveraging External Incentives in FOCIL" by Julian Ma
  + link. "A pragmatic path towards Validity-Only Partial Statelessness (VOPS)" by Thomas Thiery

- application controlled execution
  + link. "Introducing BuilderNet" by Flashbots
  + link. "Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM)" by Helius
  + link. "Application Controlled Execution (ACE) through Asynchronous Market Queues (AMQs)" by Cavey, Jacob, Max
  + link. "Latency and transaction ordering on Hyperliquid" by Jeff
  + link. "The Internet Capital Markets Roadmap" by Solana illuminati
  + link. "The Case for Opinionated Financial Infrastructure" by Atlas
  + link. "A Deep Dive into Application-Specific Sequencing" by Eclipse
  + link. "A Visual Guide to Sequencing Mechanisms" by Gurnor Narula
  + link. "A new era of defi with application specific sequencing" by Yuki

- Proto-Danksharding/PeerDAS/DAS/networking
  + link. "PeerDAS Propagation" by Pierre-Louis, mempirate
  + link. "Variants of mempool tickets" by Julian
  + link. "Blob Notaries: a distributed blob publishing design to scale DA" by Merklefruit
  + link. "Theoretical blob transaction hit rate based on the EL mempool" by Mikel Cortes
  + link. "PeerDAS - a simpler DAS approach using battle-tested p2p components" by Danny Ryan
  + link. "The Early Days of the Ethereum Blob Fee Market and Lessons Learnt". by Lioba Heimbach and Jason Milionis
  + link. "On solo staking, local block building and blobs" by Toni
  + link. "Block Arrivals, Home Stakers & Bumping the blob count" by Sam
  + link. "Max-Blobs Flag: Economic Perspective" by Toni
  + link. "Doubling the blob count with Gossipsub v2.0" by Pop, Nishant, Chirag
  + link. "Blob mempool tickets" by Francesco

- execution layer
  + link. "Toward Semantic Block Chunking" by Toni
  + link. "Payload Chunking" by Toni
  + link. "A practical proposal for Multidimensional Gas Metering" by Maria, Davide
  + link. "Reasons to have higher L1 gas limits even in an L2-heavy Ethereum" by Vitalik
  + link. "Scaling Ethereum L1 and L2s in 2025 and beyond" by Vitalik
  + link. "Formalizing decentralization goals in the context of larger L1 gaslimits and 2020s-era tech" by Vitalik
  + link. "EIP-7928: Block-level Access Lists: The Case for Glamsterdam" by Toni
  + link. "On In-Protocol Gas Futures" by Julian
  
- ethereum roadmap & proposals
  + link. "Making Sense of a ZK Staking Node" by Ladislaus
  + link. "Low-risk defi can be for Ethereum what search was for Google" by Vitalik
  + link. "Relaxing the prover hardware requirements for the next few years" by Dankrad
  + link. "The math of when stage 1 and stage 2 make sense" by Vitalik
  + link. "Simplifying the L1" by Vitalik
  + link. "Ethereum's Strategic Pivot" by David Hoffman
  + link. "A Protocol Design View on Statelessness" by Julian
  + link. "Ethereum Acceleration" by Paradigm
  + link. "13th AMA" by Ethereum Foundation Research Team
  + Ethereum Foundation
    * link. "Ethproofs 2025 Review & 2026 Roadmap" by Fara & Will
    * link. "Protocol Update 001 - Scale Blobs" by Stokes, Raul, Francesco
    * link. "Protocol Update 001 - Scale L1" by Ansgar, Tim, Marius
    * link. "lean Ethereum" by Justin Drake
    * link. "A new chapter in the infinite garden" by Aya Miyaguchi
    * link. "The Ethereum Foundation's Vision" by Aya and Vitalik
    * link. "The Ethereum Foundation's Next Chapter" by Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz
  + Electra/Prague EIPs
    * link. "Sepolia Pectra fork incident recap" by Marius
    * link. "EIP-7691: Blob throughput increase"
    * link. "EIP-7623: Increase calldata cost"
    * link. "EIP-7685: General purpose execution layer requests"
    * link. "EIP-7251: increase the max effective balance"
  + Fulu/Osaka
    * link. "Lighthouse Team on Fulu"
    * link. "Prysm's Recommendation for Fusaka"
    * link. "Lodestar's Fusaka Inclusion Perspective"
    * link. "Fusaka Mainnet Announcement" by Ethereum Foundation
  + Glamsterdam
    * link. "An MEV perspective on Glamsterdam" by Data Always and Hasu
    * link. "OPINION: The case against EIP-7732 for Glamsterdam" by Dapplion
    
- fundamental blockchain
  + link. "Serial Monopoly on Blockchains" by Noam Nisan
  + link. "Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs" by Ben Berger et al.
  
- bitcoin
  + link. "Pooling in OP_CAT's World" by Walt Smith
  
- other coins
  + link. "The Internet Capital Markets Roadmap" by Solana illuminati
  + link. "Proposal to Reduce HYPE Total Supply by 45%" by Jon and Hasu
  + link. "Crosslink: Updated Staking Design for Zcash" by Jason McGee
  + link. "Crosslink: Tokenomics" by Jason McGee

- stablecoins
  + link. "The Future of Payment Infrastructure Could Be Permissionless" by Rod Garratt and Michael Junho Lee

- news
  + link. "Demystifying the North Korean Threat" by samczsun
  + link. "TEEs are the worst they will ever be" by Quintus

      ~
    *
  +
- 
        

=========================================================

december 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

november 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

october 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

september 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

august 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

july 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

june 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

may 2025

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

april 2025

  + notes

  * Main takeaway here: in a world where lots of rollups use blobs to land "latency sensitive" transactions as part of the "hot path" for L2 users, blobs will generally become more private. E.g., any contentious data is likely to go through private channels. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

march 2025

  + notes

  * "they get the value of their transaction even if it is scheduled at later blocks"
    ~ turns into a dynamic setting where the user is infinitely patient and are price takers.
  * "is that monopolist pricing dynamics leads to never-ending price fluctuations and this happens endogenously without any stochastic element in the model and when the exogenous
  conditions are completely stable"
    ~ this must arise just from heterogeniety in user values and randomness in their arrivals?
    ~ "Also note that the model is completely deterministic." 
      > turns out not. figure 2 shows the output from the deterministic model, it looks almost like a logistic map or some other discrete dynamical system.
  * "However, as this shading requires information about the market conditions, optimal bidding may be difficult."
    ~ puts you back into the difficult FPA regime? 
  * Pretty cool, need to relate it to our repeated game with service provision. Also relate it to Matt's recent paper.
  * This all for sure has to do with supply function equilibria too. 

  + notes

  * "Approach 2: optimistic attesting"
    ~ pretty cool, block just becomes invalid. but i can see how painful this would be from the implementation pespective.
  * "Approach 1: statically verify payload with upfront builder payment"
    ~ makes sense and can allow block level base fees which can use up that extra space. 
    ~ forcing the coinbase to pay the entire blocks base fee seems hard though.

  + notes

  * "To protect the network against the cost of including these transactions, the block proposer's account (known as the COINBASE) pays an upfront “inclusion cost."
    ~ this seems like the critical change. txns must all pay that coinbase inclusion fee upfront.
  * This is a slight modification of delaying the state root, probably should have cited that. but ya, this is probably cleaner.
  * "Delayed execution and block-level base fee mechanisms are separate topics that should be addressed independently."
    ~ this feels like a pretty interesting follow up. How exactly does the base fee fit in here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

february 2025

  + notes

  * "Proposer-builder separation (PBS) is a scaling technology ... relays have also made significant investments in network infrastructure to optimize the propagation of blocks."
    ~ interesting, haven't heard this framing, and i think it is actually kinda bad. if you depend on relays to handle the heavy blocks better than solo stakers, you start making solo staking less feasible.
  * "Figure 7: cumulative distribution of unique bids between parent hashes in PBS auctions where the proposer requested a reorging parent hash"
    ~ this is so cool, basically, these reorgs aren't actually necessary. and builders may have a competitive edge by have a good prior on whether or not the proposer is going to try to reorg or not. so many games going on here.

  + notes

  * "We can do some math to compute how expensive it is to actually use the force-inclusion mechanism."
    ~ Core thesis: a big part of the L2 roadmap is force inclusion to the L1. This is a big part of https://hackmd.io/@mikeneuder/ethesis!
  * "is the ability to exit to the L1 if the L2 breaks"
    ~ Another part of the force exit is the "mass exit" scenario. Feel like this needs a better model.

  + notes

  * "We should think explicitly about economics of ETH. We need to make sure that ETH continues to accrue value even in an L2-heavy world, ideally solving for a variety of models of how value accrual happens."
    ~ Nice! agree :)
  * Still think more is needed for the value accrual story to make sense. I need to collab with a macro-economist...

  + notes

  * need to catch up on native rollup literature
  * "A separate idea is to just add a higher minimum blob fee. This would also reduce the length of usage spikes (good for network stability), and would additionally mean a more consistent fee burn."
    ~ Maryam had this idea too. I still wonder about what the min you set is and how much L2s are gonna be willing to pay for DA...
    ~ Max has an EIP for this: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-7762
  * "Long term I expect DA demand to outpace supply. Indeed, supply is fundamentally constrained by consensus participants running on home internet connections, and I don't think the equivalent of ~100 home internet connections of DA throughput is sufficient to satisfy world demand, especially as humans always find creative ways to consume more bandwidth."
    ~ Very interesting. But I just don't see DA as sticky enough. Like are people willing to pay?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

january 2025

  + notes

  * “Specifically, the selection and ordering of transactions are performed independently from their execution.”
  * ^ sounds a bit like rainbow staking, where you decompose the role of validator into different heterogeneous roles.
  * Consensus role: only determine order of transactions and ~do not~ come to consensus on the resulting state.
  * Execution roles: “raw compute” to determine the new state.
  * “Operation Processors” vs. “Operation Verifiers” are both execution roles completely separate from consensus. 
  * Key result: use consensus nodes to verify that a sufficient number of executors agree on the new state or to adjudicate and punish misbehaving nodes.
  * Reminder: In Ethereum proposals, we might have a FOCIL committee propose a set of unordered transactions and then have the builders reorder and insert over them. That is pretty similar…

  + notes

    * Presents a protocol for verification and dispute resolution, which is facilitated by the consensus nodes.
    * Collector: “receive txns and introduce them into the network”
      ~ ^ sounds a lot like a FOCIL committee member
    * Consensus node: “form block inputs but not the state after the execution”
    * Block sealing: “contains a supermajority vote about the resulting state voted on by the Verifiers and is included in a later block” (this is a finalization step that has accountable safety over the output of the execution) (note that the verifiers and the executors are different).
    * Execution node: compute outputs and execution receipts.
    * Verifier node: check the work of the execution nodes. 
    * Observer node: external data providers.
    * Not clear to me that you need all of these roles. A simpler model where the consensus and execution are the only separation seems more tractable and probably has similar properties. These details above feel more engineering motivated.
    * Stages of transaction processing
      1. Collection
      2. Ordering
      3. Execution
      4. Verification of execution.
      5. Sealing (finalization).
    * ^ should consider that a transaction can revert at any point along here, need to ensure that the fallback mechanism. Free DA feels potentially lethal in particular.
    * “Faulty computation result” protocol is essentially the same as a fraud proof for L2s. There is a challenge period, where the consensus nodes manage the dispute resolution over many rounds of communication. ~This is the key part. It feels extremely complex for an L1 to manage.~
    * They have a protocol for resolving missing transaction data, but again, that doesn't feel necessary unless we are allowing consensus to come over transaction hashes instead of the full transactions, which I don't think Ethereum would ever do.
        

  + notes

 
    * Focusing on Section 4: Block formation. The previous sections are repetitive and about cluster formation, which feels like a flow specific feature rather than something more general.
    * Protocol 3 has an interesting feature, “line 5: has received all guaranteed collections”. This sounds like a vote for a block will only be included if the transaction has been seen. Doesn't sound feasible because of private order flow, but interesting that it comes up. Not central to the point though.
    * Section 4.5 Adjudicating Slashing Challenges: extremely sparse description of the slashing and resolution process. I really think this is the core of the issue. How do you resolve, what state do you roll back to, what do you do in the meantime with transactions? Essentially, this turns into a liveness attack on the network I believe.
    * Mostly engineering details here. Sections 3 & 5 are specific to flow.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------