Author: Robust Incentives Group @ethereum--Barnabé MonnotTranslator: DAOctor@DAOrayaki.orgReviewer: Yofu@DAOrayaki.orgOriginal Article Link:https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/11/04/notes_proposer_builder.html
Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) is a widely discussed topic within the Ethereum community. It is a design concept that emphasizes the relationships between protocol and non-protocol actors to maintain and operate the blockchain. Although the discussion has been going on for over a year, Merge first and Devcon second have brought more resources and attention to PBS. This article will focus on the status, intrinsic value, and challenges of PBS.
What is PBS? PBS is, first and foremost, a design concept that recognizes that protocol participants may call upon services from third parties during their consensus responsibilities. "Protocol participants" refer to any bound and active validators in Ethereums proof of stake expected to perform various responsibilities, including proposing blocks, producing proofs, or participating in the current sync committee.
Prior to the Merge: Bundling searchers and mev-geth At the outset, PBS began before the Merge and Ethereums shift towards proof of stake. We believe that "default behavior" is the behavior of block producers who simply grab a set of transactions from their transaction pool and efficiently pack them into a block. The first deviation from this default behavior was due to some miners opening direct private lines of communication with transaction initiators where agreement on the inclusion of transactions off-chain was reached. While such contracts were privately established, mev-geth developed by Flashbots soon created a market between block producers and transaction initiators. The market relies on a trust relationship between miners (as mining pool organizations in PoW) and entities known as searchers. Searchers typically obtain user transactions from public transaction pools or from some private services they operate. User transactions are bundled together with the searchers own transactions to extract value from user transactions, for example, by following
