Kubi Mensah - Gattaca and the MEV Supply Chain

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Pledge Allegiance. This week we have on Kubi, the founder of Gadigah. Gadigah is a really interesting company. They are best known for Titan Builder, which they launched in 2023, and is now the second largest builder in Ethereum. They're responsible for nearly 40% of all blocks, and they've also recently branched out and built a relay and have other interesting plans for the future. I think Kubi and the Gadigah team have flown under the radar a little bit, but really are one of the important fascinating companies we've come across. Their rise in a little less than a year and a half has been nothing sort of amazing, and they're one of the most knowledgeable folks we've come across. In today's episode, we'll dive into the nitty-gritty of block building and the transaction lifecycle. This, Gabe, we'll talk a little bit about just how many of you have evolved, and some of the different actors have also, lastly, touched on just Gadigah itself. They've built this great block builder, they've expanded with the relay, but what's next? What do they have planned for the future? Kubi, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I know we've been planning to set this one up for a while, and you've done a few episodes and talked a little bit about what Gadigah does, but I think yeah, Carl and I have been just really excited about what you guys have been up to over the past year and a half and haven't been really looking forward to this, so thank you, Kubi, for coming on. Yeah, of course, and thanks for having me. I guess maybe to start, our listeners are generally folks that are pretty crypto-native and somewhat knowledgeable about M/V, but could you maybe give a quick overview of what Gadigah is and what your role is at the company? Yeah, sure. My name is Kubi, I see no, I'm one of the co-founders at Gadigah, and Gadigah, I guess, is most well-known actually for its block builder, it's called Titan, but our core focus really is to build and operate high-performance, sort of, out-of-part core Ethereum infrastructure, and I guess our first foray into it was with Titan the block builder, but we recently also launched the Titan Relay and we work on a bunch of other core Ethereum infrastructure, there's more in R&D stage at the moment. Awesome, and we'll dive into some of the specifics of what you guys are doing and some of the different products, like the builder and the relay and what's coming up in the future, but for listeners that aren't in the weeds of M/V and block building, like you guys are every day, which maybe give a quick overview of what that process looks like today. If I'm a user, sending a basic lifecycle of a transaction on Ethereum and the different actors that come in? Yeah, sounds good. So I think today the supply chain has become a lot more complex, but I'll keep it at a somewhat high level, I'm sure you could go into the intricacies of, like, a lot of these different parts of the supply chain. So starting with the user, say, you want to just make a simple transfer and you want to get that included on chain on Ethereum today, you basically have two options. So you have a wallet and you create your transfer in the wallet by the UX, the UI, sign up transaction, and then you have an RPC provider. And so this is basically where the paths start becoming a bit more complex. So either you use like a public RPC node, which basically just broadcasts your transactions to the memple, or you can use a private memple, which might send your transaction to an order flow auction platform or some other order flow auction aggregators. And if you go to the path of the memple, then basically anyone can see a transaction that is also connected to the PLayer, including searches, for example, or bilverse and any other actor. But if you use a private memple or an order flow auction or one of these aggregators, the transaction goes now into like this private pipeline. And in general, if there's some MEV triggered by your transaction, and this won't happen in the case of a transfer, but for example, if you're making a swap, then you will most likely have searches taking your transaction out of the public memple and combining your transaction with their own transaction. So this could either be through like a sandwich, which will involve like a front running or a backgrounding transaction, or it could be just an RV trust transaction. So just a background, but then your transaction will be bundled together with like a search or transaction or multiple search or transactions. And these will be then send us a bundle to a block builder. So this is part of the path of the public memple. Then alternatively, when your transaction goes through the private memple or through aggregators that then end up in a private memple, usually you have an auction where essentially different searches compete for the right to background your transaction or capture some MEV. And then whoever is willing to pay the most either back to you, the user or the order of auction platform directly, which then refunds it to the user, the entity or the searcher that's willing to pay the most, then wins the right to background your transaction. And then instead of most of the body that is being captured going to the searcher, it will then go mostly back to the user. So then these two paths kind of merge together again when they send the bundle to the block builder. And the block builder, this is where we come in. The block builder's role is mainly to aggregate transactions and bundles from all different kinds of sources either through the public memple, private memples from searches directly and different kinds of blocks based consumers. And the role is essentially then to sequence these transactions such that the value of the overall block reward is maximized. So the block builder usually on an ongoing basis for a given block or a given slot will build multiple blocks based on the current state of their local memple, which means the aggregation of all these sources of transactions and bundles. And once a block templates, so to speak, has been generated, these get submitted to relays and relays essentially a trusted third party between the validators or the proposes and block builders. And so relays in turn will have another auction where different block builders compete. And whoever is willing to pay the validator or the proposer, the most essentially wins that auction and gets the right to actually then build the block for the specific slot. And once that auction basically concludes and the block is selected and there are some mechanisms I'm not going to go into the details of how the selection process happens. That block then gets propagated to the p2p layer and it gets accepted on chain. And that's sort of concludes the life cycle. Very helpful overview. Thank you. So just to summarize, we have a handful of actors here that you've described. We have the user that's creating a transaction, we have the transaction front end or application which kind of acts as the transaction originator in a sense that they redirects that user flow via some rpc or something. Then you have the searcher or kind of men pool actor, whether they just or not, then you have the builder that is responsible for combining all these transactions into one block. And then you have relay that serves in between the builder and the proposer. Gadigah through your guys's goal, the titan is kind of best known for its builder today. I'm just curious, how do you guys get into block building in the first place? What kind of drove you to creating titan the builder and then eventually time the relay but maybe we can start with the builder? We originally actually used to operate as a proprietary trading firm. So during our early days, this involved arbitrage, liquidity provision, market making, decentralized exchanges. But then in the latter days, more focus actually on what we call back in the day on chain trading, which is I guess called today, MEV. So we had a lot of expertise when it came to the transaction life cycle, the EDM, being a search ourselves and understanding the intricacies of it. Actually before the merge, there was a lot of discussions around the separation of roles when it comes to block production. So the validator no longer being the sole entity that both constructs and proposes a block, but rather because the act of constructing a block became so much more complex and some other intricacies, it made a lot more sense to create a different market structure where you have specialized entities that essentially do the block construction versus then actually doing the proposal of blocks. And so given that having been a searcher, we intimately understood like the nature of that market. Plus, we had already build out a lot of infrastructure around assimilating transactions and globally distributed infrastructure that allows for like moving messages around the globe at low latencies. We had a lot of the building blocks that were necessary to be a competitive block builder. And then on top of that, we also saw the role of a block builder more as a service provider, to us when you are a trader or like a searcher, it's kind of like you are applying your technical edge against the market and capturing some value versus when you are a service provider, you're fundamentally servicing like an ecosystem, which was quite appealing to us. And the interesting part of our block construction itself was that it involved both those technically very challenging and interesting problems that we like to solve as a searcher or as a trader. Well, at the same time being more value additive because we actually servicing different ecosystem participants. So all of these things sort of combined, let us to make a venture or like start venturing into block construction as a business. Really helpful overview, Pubey. And it does feel like a lot of folks that are building in front of the M and V space started off as traders and tinkerers that we're looking at how to make money through searching opportunities or trading opportunities. But at the end of the day, as you said, building the inference that pipes, it is different. It helps a lot to have the background and the knowledge of maybe a big part of your user base or stakeholders, but they are very different things. So yes, were you guys conscious of changing your mentality? What was it like going from building a trading firm to very consciously like we're now doing something that is completely different, how did you guys like develop your strategy into becoming what became a neutral builder? So I must say even when we were operating as a trading firm, so first of all, none of us actually had a trading background. So all of us are engineers and so we don't have any actual trading experience prior to this undertaking. So it was more like an intellectual curiosity endeavor that led us to start a trading firm versus actually being like traders on a core. And so like I mentioned before, one of the very things that attracted us to this was the technical challenges and the nitty-gritty that you have to get into really understanding the underlying infrastructure on the P2P layer, the EVM and all of those things, especially our own searching, that we found very interesting, but we are engineers at heart. And so those amongst you who are engineers very well know, it's the thing that is really satisfying is actually building like a piece of technology, putting into production and it actually working and being useful. And you kind of didn't have that aspect when you're just building trading infrastructure and doing proprietary trading, plus all of us got attracted or fell down the crypto rabbit hole, so to speak, because we also have big believers of crypto and the promise that like decentralized infrastructure has and us just being participants or like actors that transact on this decentralized infrastructure wasn't as rewarding as building towards actually contributing or being part of the infrastructure itself. So we kind of have some motivations in general and there were some things that were lacking when we are just acting as a proprietary trading firm, so it wasn't so much of a like core change in philosophy rather than finding a path to what we actually really liked. So you're operating as searchers kind of traders and then you come to this decision that you know what we're going to transition to being a builder. This was correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like summer of 2023, roughly around the time that Titan comes online, the market at the time was already largely consolidating among handful of players that were kind of dominating the market share for block building. How did you look at that market in this idea, you know what, we can compete in this market, we can put a dent in there, there's a place for us here. So we actually did start a bit earlier, I think summer was roughly when we started to capture a bit more market share, but we actually launched I think the builder in early spring, so I think around March or so, I don't know the exact dates anymore. And we started shifting resources and eventually deciding to stop all our trading operations, I think in December 22 or January 23, so early in the year. And so the way we looked at it was that first of all, we had already built like a bunch of infrastructure that we knew was quite advanced and superior in terms of latency and performance, because a lot of the searching that we did was actually also on some old EVM chains where a lot of the edge came from latency, unlike on Ethereum. And so the fact that we were able to be very, very competitive gave us a lot of confidence that we had performed infrastructure and that we kind of know how to play this game, so to speak. And then we also did like a clear sort of market analysis breakdown of like the type of blocks that are being built and where the type of transaction that gets included in those blocks comes from what would access to these type of transactions look like and what are the potential edges that you can have. So you obviously never know 100%. If you actually will be competitive, but we had a lot of confidence that we would be competitive, and I think at that time, I think the only neutral builder that was able to hold their ground against some of the more vertically integrated players was builder 69 and all other neutral sort of infrastructure builders, like I think it was blocks root and block natives and flashbots, they were all losing market share. So we saw that there was clearly a place in the market that if you had the technical capabilities and the engineering chops to do so, that there's a place for a neutral builder to exist. So we think conceptually it is absolutely necessary for neutral builder to exist and we were quite confident that we had the skill set to be one of those neutral players that can remain competitive. And for the listeners who might not know, can you explain to us what it means to be a neutral builder and maybe what it means to be a non neutral builder? There's a handful of actors that would know who are in this space, like either our sink who are kind of known as integrated builders, which you maybe walk us through the difference between the two and what the implications are, and also why did you choose to be a neutral builder? There's no official definition there really, this is kind of how we saw it ourselves. So we saw block construction or a block builder being a service provider, well on one hand you have block space consumers and like you said at the beginning, users, searchers, today Leia twos and other types of users that essentially want to get their transactions included and set a non chain. So that's one part of the market on the other side of the market is the validators or the proposes that basically want to get higher block rewards and want to construct more valuable blocks. So we saw this as a job of a service provider and we think and still believe that is quite important that block space consumers basically have equitable access to block space. And that means if I want to get my transaction included on chain as long as I'm competitive enough and I'm paying enough to get my transaction included, I should have the same capability to get the transaction included as some other potential privilege actor in the supply chain. And so what we saw essentially is that if you are integrated builder and at the time or even today it was somewhat defined as being a searcher that is a significant consumer of block space while at the same time also being a builder, then on one hand that naturally gives you like a big edge and the edge can be across latency and a bunch of other things. But if I am a transaction originator or a block space consumer that doesn't operate a builder in house, I would not be able to have the same capabilities. And hence it would be much more difficult for me to get access to block space in the same way. So being a neutral builder from that perspective was all about building a block construction business around and building products around block construction business that basically give block space consumers that don't run their own in house block builder, the same capabilities that a vertically integrated player has. And that's basically on the high level. And I would say the edge that a vertically integrated builder has usually is around like I said before latency, but also it's about pricing the builder payments that you make that eventually then end up going to the proposal and maximally being able to break back or refund some of these payments back to yourself. So from the perspective of a searcher that would just mean that if I can price my builder payments as aggressively as for example a vertically integrated player, then I will have a way lower probability that my transactions will get included. But also because I will never be able to actually get refunds on the builder payments because I'm not vertically integrated or no one offers these services over the long term I just can't stay competitive. Yeah, that's very interesting. So I think two themes that will probably come up a lot in our discussion today is order flow and block production market share in the sense of like your block production success rates. Because being neutral improve your order flow in any way. And I ask because so it looks like I'm like a searcher and I know that there's an integrated builder who is doing a similar strategy to mine. Would I maybe not share my order flow with them? Would I not send my bundles to that builder? Would I choose to send my bundles to a neutral builder like Tim with fear that maybe they figure out what my strategy is because I'm actually competing with them at the same level of supply chain. Just around getting out like does it improve your guys' order flow by being neutral or you end up kind of competing on the same order flow with the integrated builders? So it certainly helps with order flow. We ran analysis back in the day and even today and you'll see that searches that compete on the same strategies. In general, there are certain searches that would never send to vertically integrated players. So given the relative market share that potential vertically integrated players have, the amount of block space basically control or provide access to in some cases is just too large that these competitors can't ignore and so they will still send order flow to them but they will most likely also price it differently. So I guess in general it certainly does help with more diverse order flow. What we saw in the early days though was that the most competitive searches/traders on those specific strategies were the builders themselves and so even though we didn't have access to more diverse order flow because those searches weren't as competitive, we weren't able to compete as much but that is changing a bit now. But I would say overall as a block builder the other core edge that it gives you if you are not a vertically integrated player is that you just have a different focus as a company. So being a trading firm and being a competitor search just requires a lot of focus and a lot of mind space. And so if you as a block construction business are solely focused on building products around block building on making the block construction experience/block inclusion experience better for your block space consumers that just shifts the mind space that is focusing on those specific problems and the leverage that you have improving your infrastructure and all the different nitty gritty so alpha that you can stack in a very different way than if you are a larger trading firm that also like mostly focuses on trading. So it's more of a conceptual edge but in practice we do see that also being quite relevant. So Gadigah you guys come in with this differentiated neutral approach, you do it in a thoughtful way. You're able to come in at a time where block building is already competitive and I believe by the fall of 2023 you guys are at I think it's like 20-30% market share. People start to maybe they know who you are maybe they don't but you guys are at least visible on a lot of the dashboards, the metrics that people follow. Did you walk us through like what was it like going through that growth period from when you got from the launch to getting to that market share like was it exciting? Was there a new level of scrutiny? Did people regard you with suspicion like oh like they're coming in as these quote-unquote neutral builders and they're counter-positioning to some of the integrated builders but what are their real motives? Like did you get some of that? Again I don't think the growth you guys had in that short period happens very often. So I think yeah like we'd love to just hear your mindset during that exciting period. I mean the short answer is all of the above. So excitement it was a roller coaster like you know there's some growth and then you're stuck for a while and as a training from you are not public facing at all and then this was also the first time that we actually had to be a bit more public and let people know about us and who we are and like a big element of all of this is also like creating this element of trust and that is a hard thing because that takes time and so the longer you around it you have opportunities to screw people over and have let's say incentives potentially economically to screw people over and you don't and the longer that happens the more trust you build but I guess overall the way we really started was trying to identify where we could have our initial edge and I think I mentioned this earlier it's basically dissecting the different kinds of blocks that are possible what kind of flow exists where they originate from and basically is trying to just gain a little bit of market share and then keep increasing that. So initially one of the key things that we actually focus on where we call vanilla blocks so vanilla blocks are basically blocks that purely are made of public mental transactions and we're like okay we don't have any private order flow no one knows us we don't produce any order flow ourselves. So why don't we just focus on blocks that are purely made up of mental transactions and make sure we build much better blocks than anyone else and back in the day I think it was between one and five percent of blocks that were purely made out of mental transactions and we were basically just targeting those and so focusing across the entire supply chain like infrastructure getting access to mental transactions and really low latencies being able to build and sequence these transactions better than others and there's a lot of alpha across the stack but essentially just making sure that we are basically one of the best when it comes to public mental transactions over vanilla blocks and that's how we started. We did that and we had a little bit of market share and then we went into all the forums and the discord chats and the telegram chats and started posting hey when you block builder started messaging searches on these like anons on these forums sometimes even reached out to people directly on the ethos can chats and things like that and just basically try to make people aware that we exist and we started getting a little bit of private order flow so search upon those that other builders were getting but we weren't and we basically made sure that whenever we had order flow parity we were better than everyone else and then as things came along there's a little bit of a flywheel effect where you are building infrastructure that is better than everyone else people do not notice at the moment because you don't have order flow that has parity with the other competitors but like you when start winning a significant number of blocks and we basically just kept iterating and the better we became and the more order flow we started getting and the more people started to trust us especially once more larger well known searcher contract started submitting to us that is also a bit of a approval basically that okay if this searcher trusts to send the order flow to this builder the builder must be okay and we just kept going yeah that's how we basically bootrupped our growth at what point did Jared start sending their bundles to Titans was that a catalyst at all that was certainly an important one so I think Jared overall at least back in the day the level or the number of blocks that you build or the market share that you had to have to be considered by Jared was fairly low so overall I think Jared had always been quite open to sending flow to new block billers and we started all the time as soon as like new block billers came up and they just had a little bit of market share Jared started sending to them but yeah that definitely made a massive difference because Jared still today is like a very significant consumer of block space yeah that's nice to hear that Jared spreads a lot at least to the little guys as well but again you touch on this point right of like block production market share being like kind of this significant factor in gaining private order flow because to your points like if I'm going to share my private order flow I kind of want to have some guarantee that it will be included and so maybe I won't reveal my private order flow to somebody with less than 1% block production market share because there's a 1% chance that my order flow gets included in the next block where somebody who has 30 40% like maybe a beaver or noise sink at the time they're maximizing their probability of landing that opportunity rights as such we've seen subsidization of blocks become a popular strategy among the smaller block builders and so what that means is they might actually pay out of pocket rights or in some way or another to propose or to kind of make their bid more attractive is that a strategy that you guys employed early on just to kind of increase your market share and if it is maybe can you explain why or like how you rationalize it and how it is say you kind of are employing that strategy still not 100% sure who actually started this but if I remember correctly I think bill of 69 was actually the most well known entity that started applying subsidies and I think back in the day they called it M.E.V. smoothing right where so this concept that M.E.V. is very spiky and that you'll have some number of blocks that have a lot of M.E.V. which means that most likely you'll be able to capture more profits on those blocks and then you basically take some of those profits and apply them across other blocks and I think in the post they call the M.E.V. smoothing because you're sort of smoothing it out to the proposes you don't give it all to one proposer but smoothing across other blocks but that was the first time I think where at least according to our knowledge that the block builder started basically shifting value from like a high value blocks to lower value blocks in order to increase market share as well so I can't say it was our playbook but it was certainly something that we saw in the market back in the day and as I mentioned before we really went into the nitty-gritty and started to break down for different kinds of blocks and different kinds of market condition where was the value coming from and naturally obviously also saw that subsidy is a significant part of what leads you to win blocks and hence at a certain point of time when we hadn't got confidence that we had good infrastructure that we were winning some market share and that we were also able to take some profits on some blocks that's when we also started applying subsidies back in the day. One thing I noticed is you guys historically haven't done like a ton of publicity. You guys I think maybe earlier this year people saw the Titan Builder they had like a few months where you were getting to know people and it's like by that point you guys are relatively established and within MV like how did you guys think through your public perception and sharing more about what you guys actually do like just curious like how you guys thought about that in like late 2023 to really 2024. Yeah for sure so just because we are more of an engineering team than anything else I would say like being public or very open it's not really part of a DNA as such but we're definitely making an effort to be more open and transparent around the things we do especially since what we are doing is more of a product/service where you need to be more outward facing you need to actually interact with your customers so to speak your clients. It's somewhat different we're in a normal company usually you know have a product and you have a customer maybe it's a SaaS business and people can sign up and you have direct relationships whereas in crypto obviously you have a lot of permissionless systems and it is not exactly the same but it's quite important that people know about us and I think we touched on this earlier before because there are a bunch of trust assumptions that are being made when you send transactions and bundles to a block builder like being trustworthy is actually also a key factor that is important to you first of all being relevant but also getting like transaction flow and order flow in order to be competitive and so I think both from the perspective that we are building products and we want to be more outward facing and products are more useful when people know about them and then also just for the block construction business itself if you don't have the order flow parity or have order flow to build the blocks you can't really be competitive so both from those perspectives it was important that we become more outward facing and let people know who we are, dogs are self the people behind the team and just create more trust around what we're building. Yeah and on that note Titan's products scope has expanded recently you guys launched a relay alongside the builder which is just an additional product now I'm curious to understand what was your decision to launch relay relays and historically mostly been thought of as kind of these non-incentivized trusted third parties that operate as a public good for Ethereum to grow via this existing PBS auction mechanism since again just as a reminder right like the relay doesn't really see any sort of this MEV supply flow in terms of like it doesn't profit at any point all it does is sit between the purpose and the builder and make sure that the auction is being conducted properly we've actually seen other companies shut down relay specifically because of lack of incentive to do so and you guys instead went ahead and launched one yeah what made you decide to launch a relay how do you guys think about these products that sit alongside the builder? We made the decision back in the day I think this was actually after ecc 2023 there were like some discussions I think around EPS and a bunch of other market structure changes and it was quite apparent that at least for the next few years even if EPS emerged so that's just in protocol and trying PBS instead of the out of protocol PBS that is in place today that the role of the relay would still be relevant so as a block builder we very well know that latency is very important and it's one key thing that makes block builder competitive and after ecc there were these rumors essentially I was starting to emerge that certain other larger block builders were going to launch their own sort of vertically integrated relays which would mean that basically they can spend significant resources on making those relays small performance and essentially cut out any other builder that doesn't have access to the relay that is at least as fast so as a block builder and us always having seen our role being like this neutral block builder that can basically provide this equitable access to block space we knew that if we didn't make sure there was at least another relay there's out there that was at least as competitive story as the these new relays that potentially will be vertically integrated and shut other builders out we won't be able to stay competitive and so on one hand we wanted to ensure that there's going to be at least one relay out there that is competitive and we given the current relay incentives and that some relays were starting to shut down and we didn't want to rely on the existing relays because we didn't know I didn't have confidence on one hand that they are going to keep operating those relays and how many resources are going to be invested into making sure that they are as competitive as those potentially vertically integrated relays we basically took it up on ourselves and were like okay we know how to build this kind of infrastructure we are really good at it and so we are just going to build one ourselves and one very important part was that we were not going to be a vertically integrated relay which meant basically that we will never have any privileged access and we also saw that this model was basically something that had already been done by multiple other neutral parties in this space so this was obviously flashbox first both were the largest relay and builder operator but also block stood were both built and really operators and the same with block native and so we said okay we made it our mission to be like a neutral competitive block builder we can do the same thing for relay and that basically started the venture to build a relay product cool yeah so it sounds like it's almost like an investment decision from your end because it does support your more profit driven business which is the builder right in a sense that you are not dependent on the market of public goods to run highly performing relays you figured okay you know what we can do this in house and now we can support it and then it's parts any persistent public goods development thing in the sense that you guys went ahead and open source kits you are running it in a neutral capacity as you mentioned and so it benefits everybody including yourselves in your own operations exactly and like we generally have this approach of being long-term greedy so in the short term we could obviously be the first vertically integrated relay because we weren't obviously sure at what point in time the other builders might launch their relay but we also saw this as basically the nuclear option right like if we were the ones to launch the vertically integrated relay first we might have an edge over some time and that could like lead to a certain amount of dollars that we could make more for that period but on one hand that would also lead to basically a big change in the market structure where everyone else would basically be cut out that doesn't operate a relay and will naturally incentivize every other builder who wants to be competitive to do the same thing so on one hand we knew this was necessary for a competitive market to remain and so we wanted to do a de-risk on that front but on the other hand we also wanted to make sure that the market remains competitive and we think and still believe so that having like an open relay that is open source and basically that has commoditized any edge that you can have on a relay front as better for the market than having an vertically integrated searcher builder relay and however far you want to go yep so now you basically have these two new tool actors that are side by side in the supply chain as we mentioned earlier the relay is kind of like the most trusted party maybe you could push back on that and say the builder is maybe more trusted but the relay is quite trusted at least from the builder's standpoint it's the most trusted because they share their blocks with the relay under the assumption that their block first of all won't get revealed to everybody and second of all we'll get produced if they have the highest bid now it's very clear that you guys are not very fully integrated but how do other builders get comfortable with sending your blocks to your relay just knowing for a fact that they are still competing with you at a block production level like how can they kind of no okay I'm going to trust sign here it's a kind of not doing funny business at the relay level yeah just curious like what's the reception in life and the block builder side so we have gotten at least one of our then largest competitors to start submitting to a relay and we recently also transitioned to being fully permissionless which we couldn't at the beginning just to make sure that we can actually handle the load but now we are actually fully permissionless and we had for some time now one of the other biggest competitors submitting to a relay and they still are so it is happening it did take some time and some analysis on their front and I think in general it's also a resource and investment on the other counter parties say the other builders to make sure that there's no funny business going on obviously our code is open source and you can put some monitoring in place and if you're sophisticated I think it's actually quite apparent if you put in like some sort of side door and give yourself an edge over everyone else and so it takes some time though to do these analysis and they were being done and we have been onboarding more builders recently the other bottleneck obviously is also scaling on the proposer side so we currently have roughly around 25 to 27% of the state connected and so we also don't have super large coverage in terms of the proposer set yet so I think the more we scale on the proposer side which is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem as well but I think we are slowly starting to get to a stage where we start hitting a tipping point and we'll start scaling a lot more soon but yeah I think if you have more incentive by having larger coverage on the proposer side obviously that creates more incentive for the other builders to connect as well especially because we are quite confident about the performance of a relay and we basically keep pushing a lot on in terms of the different features that we offer on the relay side as well that makes it attractive just for different participants to start using it cool yeah it makes sense yeah so basically things are all in the open right people can see that it's submitted they can see ultimately how the auction is executed if it's your relay's use and so in theory if you tried to do anything funny today you might be discovered out of future points and so you would be risking your entire reputation as this kind of neutral actor and so for you guys it maybe just doesn't make sense to put that at stake yeah exactly cool moving on to order flow there's been quite a bit research and discussion around the consolidation of the builder landscape we've kind of talked about this already a little bit at the moment it's actually really more like fever and tighten probably at the moment but I think in the past year it's called like it's been three actors it's been beaver our sink and tighten beaver and our sink obviously as we've mentioned our integrated builders they have in-house searchers that run primarily six or six other tries and so they can compete at a high level in that strategy tighten as a neutral builder you guys are competing at a grander scale with lots of different order flow strategies a lot of the discussion around the consolidation of the builder marketplace has led to has pointed towards the growing trend of privatization of order flow which you've also attached on it's kind of been said to be the leading factor and kind of like builder growth and builder success rates what are your thoughts on private order flow and maybe before we really get into that actually where does private order flow come from why is it private to somebody who doesn't really understand here like why do we have such a thing as private order flow versus public order flow so private order flow has had a very long history so private order flow used to exist before the merge when basically flashbots created a flashbots auction this wasn't the proof of work days and the reason basically I mean it's mainly MEV related which means there was a disadvantage to having your transaction publicly available in the mempool so this is one because there's information leakage so if you're a user you might get frontrun and sandwich and things like that but if you're a searcher your trade might just be copied by generalized frontrunners and others and so transaction privacy because of information leakage was very much needed secondly there was the need to guarantee ordering so flashbots also created this notion of the bundle primitive which is basically a way to specify a specific order for a subset of transactions and either like the transactions get included in that order they don't get included at all and in order for that to be viable these transactions would have to be private unless you could implement this on a particular level and so transaction privacy was absolutely necessary and because of MEV there was just a need for that to happen and then this is basically how these like off-chain and private auctions emerged right with the flashbots auction and it had a bunch of other benefits actually because before there was transaction privacy and these auctions there was like a lot of spam on chain which was just very very inefficient use of block space and prices like sometimes just getting into blocks for normal block space consumers and users that was just absolute nightmare so back in sort of the cowboy days of MEV and where everything was in the mempool things were actually quite bad and the reason that triggered all of this was MEV so transaction privacy and private order flows that has been around for a long time now after the merge and with block builders and as I described at the beginning basically was this establishment of this transaction supply chain where you have these like private channels that guarantee like I said before that there's no information leakage and that your transaction doesn't get front run or sandwich and things like that but also that these different like new private auctions could facilitate guaranteed ordering and other kinds of guarantees that you wouldn't want to have around your transaction inclusion which was all and it still is a very very useful so that's I guess still part of the history but another notion of order flow auctions emerge as part of this and the idea was basically that if I am a user and I trigger like a MEV events by either let's say creating like a big trade that then moves the market and trades like a massive arbitrage opportunity then there's in general consensus in the ecosystem that most of that value should be redistributed back to the entity that basically costs this opportunity to arise in the first place and so that was the idea behind things like flashbots protects and meth blocker and bling and miracle equilibrium and a bunch of other order flow auction platforms and what this basically led to was that first of all all these transactions remain private so no more front running information leakage and all of that stuff but also now you can have competition for who gets the right to actually background or like capture this MEV opportunity happens somewhere else such that the redistribution of that value actually can be controlled in a way that the transaction originators are happy with this led to this emergence of OFA as they're called today or order flow auction platforms and all of this is safe like all of this was good and more aligned with the UX for users and things like that and naturally creates an incentives for more transaction to be private now once transaction are private there needs to be some element of trust around sharing those private transactions otherwise the guarantees that you want to give to the transaction flow originators can't be upheld and so this is also why it's so important for builders to be trustworthy and if you're not trustworthy or you're not seen as being trustworthy you don't get order flow and if you don't have order flow you can't compete so all of these things are very tightly intertwined and then finally why is there such a network effect with all of this and why especially with this consolidation of the builder market that has been going on is that push things more to the limit so it is very much related to order flow but order flow is not everything but if you don't have order flow you can't really compete on the same level right and so you have a market where it's like really necessary to have private transactions and private order flow and in order to receive these transactions you need to be trustworthy and you need to give certain guarantees and things like that but that naturally also creates a market structure where if you are new entrants it will make it much more difficult to get access to these types of transactions and that naturally leads to if you're not being competitive across different factors and not having market share and all these different kinds of things not getting access to this order flow now if you are in a certain stage of a change in market equilibrium where maybe at the beginning you had like 10 builders and everyone is getting order flow there was another thing that people started realizing and actually the first entities in this space that started realizing this were vertically integrated builders so the searcher builders so to speak and that was that on one hand you can have the competition for redistributing and capturing the value at different parts of the supply chain but if you are the only entity that creates certain types of value if you keep that value to yourself by just channeling that order flow to yourself exclusively then it is most likely that you can retain more of that value back to yourself as the originator or potentially also to other players right so that's like one key part of why these vertically integrated searcher builders have an edge is because they can retain more value back to themselves as the originator of that value and so this basically started this trend of exclusive order flow which is different from private order flow where private order flow is basically everything that's not in the mempool exclusive order flow is private order flow that exclusively only gets sent to one builder so to speak within this context of pbs at least and so now other transaction originators also realize okay if there's a lot of value that I generate myself if I send this to every builder all of the value goes to the proposes but I'm actually the entity that is like triggering or causing this value to emerge in the same place and so just like with an OFA I want to make sure that I have control of where that value flows as much as possible and I only want to pay the proposes such that I have access to block space but any surplus I want to have refunded to myself and that's basically what amplifies this notion of exclusive order flow where initially it was only the searcher builders that were basically keeping their internally generated order flow exclusively to themselves because it actually did allow them to retain more of that value for themselves which is fair because they were the originators of that flow but then other block space consumers also realized this and that if you do some tweaking in terms of like where the competition happens and you can change the way it gets reduced to be done and you can reduce to be more of that back to the originators. That was super interesting I think there's a lot to unpack here you could clearly tell that we've hit the corner of the supply chain so just to summarize private overflow basically stops user transactions via transaction originators from hitting the public mempool because that led to congestion and led to high fees it also led to transactions being kind of manipulative sandwiched in ways that maybe hurt the user experience right a few traders being sandwiched every time then users not going to be very happy because suddenly their trade execution is worsened so transaction originators start to privatize that overflow in the ways that improve their experience and then actually further along does also improve the ability to recapture or redistribute the enemy as you searched on but a consequence of this is that now searchers and builders need access to this private overflow and so it does consolidate the market such that only the people who have access to the order flow are able to compete at a high level because ultimately order flow is the value right if you don't have order flow then you miss out on value and so that's why we are now soon in this kind of consolidation but could be also touched on the difference between private overflow and exclusive order flow which I think is a very important concept here because we have started to see this new thing you have exclusive order flow providers hopped up and and how that is even further consolidating the builder marketplace and to clarify exclusive order flow as you mentioned is order flow there is only sent to one builder so instead of being either auctioned off via an OFA another flow auction or distributed to a few handful of builders it's a single builder receiving private order flow which means that builder can now profit in ways that other builders can'ts and I think you also touched on how those transaction originators think about these agreements in ways that they actually want to see some of that value returns to them they don't want to overpay for block inclusion they want to pay it's necessary and then they want to receive the surplus to do whatever it is they might do my period distributing to their users or something like that titan is known to be working with the few exclusive order providers for example the leading target but banana gun which has been a few reports now about this I think to most people it's not obvious how these agreements work we kind of are introducing like an off chain element here to this in a way that way everything else has previously been on chain can you walk us through what these agreements look like how they're structured and how you think about them first of all like I said at the beginning we've always focused on trying to build features on top of the builder to try and service like our clients so to speak and this is essentially exactly the same thing so it is not like a deal per se it is actually a product that we have been working on and hopefully should soon be at a stage where we can make it like publicly available but essentially the idea is that like I previously mentioned that you supply value to our builder and you want to have certain kinds of guarantees around inclusion but you only want to pay as much as necessary in order to get your transaction included and when there's a surplus you want to have a refund so basically just the same concepts that existing OFA already have implemented in the past the difference really is that the existing OFA solely focused on MEV in the form of like arbitrage and liquidations and things like that where this is a more generalized way of refunding builder payments or priority fees in general and because it actually requires the flexibility of knowing in real time or having certain amount of value in order to make sure that the block actually gets included on chain so this involves like how much value is being used to bid you kind of kind of have this auction being separate and not part of the block construction and the PBS auction and bidding itself so it kind of has to be happened under the same roof so to speak and so what we've essentially been working on for a while now and our partnership or I've been working with banana gun who have helped shape this product is essentially a way for transaction originators to send their bundles to us as a provider and then specifying certain things around inclusion so for example do you want to be included in this block or maybe it's okay to be included over the next X block so what's the urgency of being included on chain maybe there's a cap of how much value you ultimately want to spend in terms of your total builder payment being made and then you can specify as well how much refunds you want to make or want to receive after the block is one and the certain surplus that's attributable to your block contribution can be refunded to yourself so it's not fully iron out yet but we will start making a public pretty soon but essentially it will be a plug-and-play product where you can essentially yourself through like a self-service backend specifies certain kinds of configuration around refunds and inclusion and a few other things around reversion guarantees and all kinds of intuitive features and that will allow you to have a better experience and minimize like the costs that you pay okay super cool that's really interesting so it sounds like maybe I was wrong in saying that this is actually an off-chain agreement how should we think about this is this kind of comparable to on-chain OFA is that we're seeing today is it going to be open to anybody they could all access it and define it in a way and at a referral just get pushed to time yeah absolutely so it is certainly an off-chain auction is all configurable and stuff off-chain there's a certain element of inefficiency that happens if for example you do refunds on a per transaction basis on a per bundle basis and that's just because you would have to create a transfer which is at least a minimum of 21k gas and then depending on what the base fee is you're burning that basically every single time and we basically allow you to bundle or batch these refunds in bulk and things like that so there's not like a on a clear per transaction per bundle phase this refunds that happen so this I think is what adds to the somewhat of the opaqueness because not everything is on-chain and this then naturally also leads to all the conspiracies and all these things that people think are happening like behind closed doors which in part is fair because we haven't openly communicated this yet and we obviously haven't openly launched the product yet but we will pretty soon once is actually in a mature and fully production ready stage but yeah I guess that's it in summary and does this conflict with your position as a neutral builder at all does it kind of lead to prioritizing order flow that is arriving from this auction or yeah curious how it impacts other bundles or searches that are not participating in this new product yeah absolutely great question so it certainly doesn't there is currently this transition to a period where we haven't made this a product that is accessible to everyone yet so from that perspective not everyone can receive refunds at the moment when they interact through the tight and builder that being said we never prioritize a certain type of flow over other flow unless you're willing to pay for it right and so there's this fair competition where whatever your block contribution is or your buildup payment is as compared to anyone else we will certainly not prioritize your transaction because you are part of this product you still will need to pay enough to be included so if someone else is sending a bundle through our permissionless endpoints that is paying as one eth will not include your transaction as paying as let's say point nine eth so that certainly doesn't exist and it's also not incentive compatible because if there's less value in our block overall it will make it less likely for us to in the auction in the first place so we always give equitable access so to speak but that being said that specific product is not public yet so there is a case to be made at least during this transition to a period that other people or other users might not kindly have access to refunds in the same way that being said I think we are very well known as one of the most open builders in the space and we generally are happy to work with all different kinds of players that have approached us in the past and who will in the future to experiment around features and we have actually experiment around a lot more features that has been being shelf completely because it turned out like that was not a good idea and so this is just one of the things this is emerged to actually work well now and that we are transitioning to like a self-service product but again it's also not something that we could without actually transitioning it to like a self-service product actually scale because it currently requires like some manual settings and a lot of things that we wouldn't be able to do at scale if we don't transition to this product which we are currently doing yeah okay very cool it sounds to me like the biggest impact here is once you do open it up any sort of transaction originator will now have the opportunity to get a much more competitive and custom way get refunds for the M&D value that they generate one point there is and I think we've already seen some pushback on this actually among other papers and kind of discussions is that leads to less value at the proposer level because the refund there is correct me if I'm wrong but that's technically value that maybe would have flown down to the proposer previously now it's being captured earlier on and then being sent back to the transaction originator so we can catch that value and redistribute it back to the transaction originator how do you think about that kind of redistribution of value what do you think about proposers pushing back against that potentially what is kind of like the net outcome here for the overall supply chain and its actors I think this is actually not contentious at all because this has been a trend for quite a while now so I think the contention is just around the fact that this specific way of offering refunds first of all I've never been discussed that really openly been discussed and secondly is being perceived as going into the pockets of these builders to do backroom deals which is obviously not something that like the industry supports but in general this notion of the apps or the protocols or the users leaking MEV and that new that the applications should be MEV aware or the protocol should be more MEV aware and that there should be different redistributions mechanisms and this obviously was very much started by OFA and there was absolutely no push back there and everyone pretty much in the ecosystem is aligned that users shouldn't get screwed over and if there's value that's being leaked it should go back to the users same thing with LPs where you know you have like LVR solutions that are being worked on like Sorrella and others for example I think this is very much just in line with the trend of like there was MEV that people really didn't know about and didn't know how to deal with their industry is maturing and the applications and different layers of the stack are becoming more MEV aware and that their systems are essentially being put in place in order to redistribute the MEV more equitably so from my perspective this is actually not a contentious issue and very ecosystem aligned and I think the only thing that people usually push back on is this idea that there are these backroom deals and that like builders or other kinds of entities are aligning their pockets by making these like backroom deals behind closed doors and smokey rooms which absolutely is a fair point but I don't think this any push back in general with MEV redistribution really interesting discussion on the relay and order flows but I wanted to double click on one thing you talked about just now could be which is redistributing MEV and how apps have developed their thinking on MEV generally compared to even just like a year or two ago I'd say that applications are I think thinking much more deeply about MEV from the initial design stages many of them are trying to either mitigate it in some way or potentially recapture it so that value goes back to users I would say some folks some builders think there's a world in which MEV's captured entirely at the top of the supply chain it would love to hear like how you guys maybe think about this trend and what some of your conversations with applications that look like because obviously it would be a big change to the market structure would impact everybody in the supply chain a lot so yeah I'd love to hear some of your thoughts here overall very much aligned with 30thos I really don't think it would be possible to basically make MEV go to zero but I think it's very very possible to be a lot more MEV aware like further up to stack the application of protocol level and different parts of the supply chain so that's going to have an impact in terms of how much of the MEV gets shifted probably downstream to the proposes but think overall even if today when you're looking at the numbers the overall yield that is being generated through attestations and other kinds of consensus layer rewards versus execution layer rewards where some of it is priority fees and MEV it is significant but it's not massively different so I actually don't think that overall that would be negative from a yield largely negative from a yield perspective for proposes what I think overall though is that this will lead to a much healthier ecosystem and as we are working on building this more efficient systems both in terms of getting transaction included on chain guaranteeing privacy building things around inclusion all these things that users actually care about we are building a platform on an ecosystem that is actually much much better for users and it's going to be more scalable and attract more users which in turn you have more users and have more usage will generate more activity and hence yield for the ethereum ecosystem overall so I think like a long term this is all aligned across everyone who's part of the ecosystem and I think only very more short term focus ecosystem players will have an issue with that but overall very much aligned with how we are thinking as well and there is sometimes this question so if you as a block builder no longer make all the MEV how are you guys making revenue and we've always said like the way we look at making revenue is by being long term green and by building stuff that unlocks more value and if you create products and features and things that create more value you naturally will be in a position to also capture some of their value either through fees or other kinds of payments and so overall we are also not concerned that this would mean the death of the builder business so we should fight against it and generally always take the stance and like building something long term that is aligned with the ecosystem and if we create something of value we'll naturally be in a position to also capture some of their value totally makes sense and I think having that mindset and an approach to building a long term reputation really I think is a big part of what got you guys to becoming a dominant builder in the first place we've been really in the weeds again on some of this stuff and I just want to maybe take a step back before we get into some of the R&D developments in MVV land the MV space changes a lot and it changes very quickly a few years ago it was really just flashbots driving things really making this a call it like an industry they professionalize in a lot of ways they improved access to knowledge and lowered the barriers for new folks who wanted to tinker now it's like pretty well known it's like MV is really different there's dozens of research shops there's a huge variety of folks in the supply chain from your individual tinkerers to venture backed startups trying to make a profit market makers and you have like quarter depths chiming in on new developments and I guess yeah my question is like how do you feel overall about how MVV has evolved over the past year or two where's the new innovation coming from their specific parts of the market or value chain that's driving the trends is it largely just responding to user behavior and how applications are iterating like what do you think has driven the changes and innovation we've seen over the past like call it a few months to a year so overall I would say I'm actually quite happy with the way MVV is evolving in the Ethereum ecosystem obviously it's not perfect and I think there are lots of problems that we still have to solve but overall given the amount of activity the amount of assets that are locked on chain in the Ethereum ecosystem and the sophistication of it all I think it's the most mature markets that exist today and it is a lot better than any other ecosystem and other ecosystems that might seem a bit better also have like a lot less activity and a lot less contention and as soon as some of these ecosystem actually get more activity things look a lot worse so I think sometimes there can be a sort of doomsday view of how bad things are but overall I'm actually very positive and also very optimistic about the future so I guess on a high level quite happy with the way things are progressing and then in terms of who is pushing things forward in terms of market structure evolution and research in terms of MV it's pretty much everyone across the stack these days so a lot of the innovation initially obviously was championed by flashbots with the initial white paper and then they have since implemented a bunch of market structures but this has naturally also now led to a more mature industry and with a lot of the knowledge being out there and a lot of research being done you now actually have a lot more awareness of what MVS I think as said before there's still a long way to go and things have been pushed from like applications and particles that are becoming more MV aware as I said which is part of the current trend but also obviously the core Ethereum foundation and other core devs and people that are deeply thinking about the protocol itself I think are much more MV aware and are making design decisions that are a lot more informed than they used to because now we actually have real world data and also this trend of understanding that just theorizing about some of these problems is never going to lead to a good real world solution because these systems are just so complex and have so many influencing factors and so rather than like trying to intellectualize and come up with a perfect theoretical solution taken an approach of seeing how things play out in a more controlled environment and potentially out of protocol and then making more informed decisions around what should move into the particle itself and what should be tackled by the core protocol versus what should be left outside I think overall is also like a very solid approach so overall I'm quite happy I'm excited as ever to like being in the space and like the new startups being formed to try and build solutions and solve some of these problems and the protocol itself or the base layer is making changes the applications and making changes so I think overall everyone is working towards a bright future you talked about the role that core devs play which is obviously really important we've seen a lot of really neat research come out of the EF folks as well as other researchers in the Ethereum that ultimately impact out the protocol shakes out and impacts how a movie shakes out I think the role of the EF and the role of researchers in the theorem is recurring topic not just for MEV like we've had a lot of discussions about economic policies like issuance and all this stuff and I think like one I don't know if critique is the right word but one that I've heard on the issuance topic at least is like oh the researchers EF they're not taking into account the needs of users the needs of the businesses and commercial enterprises that have projected the next like six to 12 months based off of establishments and are making business decisions based off of that and it's like not to say that you can't propose some of these changes but at least you need to have like a more open discourse before maybe suggesting some of these large changes and I don't know that that necessarily applies to MEV but curious sort of how you think about the core devs roles and research and if there is attention at all like how you guys take that into account I think this certainly is attention and that is necessary because you have all these different ecosystem participants and their incentives and a good ecosystem can try and resolve or aggregate different kinds of views and a good ecosystem can emerge when these views are merged and resolved optimally with the ideals that we as an ecosystem wants in mind basically so like a hard part especially for the EF or other researchers are that you want to do like research in the open and doing research in the open means that you have some views but they might not be fully formed views yet because you don't want to do this in a closed room and have a fully formed opinion yet you need to get some feedback from the outside world so I think sometimes there's just this tension where researchers might put out a certain view and then other ecosystem players might have an outrage and say hey like how can you put out this view but this is just part of the process and the earlier you put out the view the earlier you have the chance to also get other people's perspectives and potential impact of like a certain system or mechanism design that you might want to propose and so I think in general it's not a bad thing and there have certainly been lots of proposals that never went anywhere and there's a very very long list of even EIPs you know and before any proposal becomes an EIP there's a lot of work and speccing that goes into it that never made it into production and so I think it is good that this happens early I think it's good that people make noise about it and that it comes to that tension to a lot of people so that we have a more diverse impact of views on all of these decisions but overall I don't still think it's a negative thing and so far I haven't seen any major decisions actually being pushed to production that's a majority of the ecosystem agrees this batch for our future so to speak. Yeah I think that's quite a fair assessment definitely I think that there just as a whole right and definitely like the leadership are quite conscious of making sure that any sort of major change to the protocol is in general agreement overall I know like Gatican you guys have been involved in some of these developments for example most recently the pre-conf and base role of development landscape with specifically commit boost I mean we've spoken about like yoga as work and actually open sourcing the relay that you've built which in theory could be done it is again like helping the ecosystem grow how do you guys think about like getting involved in developing and shaping the future of the ethereum in that capacity versus kind of like we're running a business here that's profit driven but we're also going to allocate our time towards like developing the ecosystem in the more like public goods in type of way and maybe like to what extent do you think it would benefit the ecosystem if more people participated in the early stage of development for some of these proposals and ideas as you mentioned yeah absolutely so it's always a fine balance because we actually a very small company so we recently grew the team a bit but we are a total of 12 people at the moment which involves three co-founders and we basically have eight engineers and one data scientist and so we don't have a ton of resources and we maintain our builder the relay and also engage in a bit more open source work these days but overall we love the ecosystem we think overall the best position to be in as a company is maximizing basically our alignment with the ecosystem overall and putting us in a position where we build value add things as the ecosystem evolves and especially in an industry like crypto and specifically mv which evolves pretty quickly you kind of can't stay too far away from the next evolution of the market structure and so we naturally need to invest ongoing resources into our existing products and make sure that they stay competitive and we push in terms of innovation and features on that front but at the same time we are living in a world where basically the market structure can evolve fairly quickly and that might have significant impact on the business itself and so our position generally is to try and stay on top of these changes try to make real-time decisions on the likelihood of certain changes actually coming to real life and adopting such that we can actually be value additive in this new evolution of the market structure and so I think conceptually pre-confirmations or specifically also base sequencing make a lot of sense and will make Ethereum as an ecosystem a lot more competitive because there is somewhat of this I guess fear that like Ethereum will just become a DA or a blockchain so to speak and base sequencing opens the door to the base layer being or providing a different kinds of service with the validator set the decentralized validator set that it has which I think is very good for the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem so overall aligned with what is good for the ecosystem and if we can give in our skill set and our capabilities that we've been able to build up help make some of these things happen or contribute in a meaningful way we will try and do so as much as possible and there are some phases during which we are super-swung then we can't really deal with anything else and sometimes where we can contribute a bit more and so yeah we just try to strike a balance but I just seem to always try to be as helpful as possible that's a good approach and yeah certainly a good long-term view to be open-minded about some of this stuff and to the extent that you guys can help out the key thing I want to add is that like sometimes there can be this intuition to try and grasp onto this status quo because you are currently successful with the status quo of things and I think that is just again very short-term cited because if you try to keep a market structure so to speak that is not actually the best for the ecosystem then that will in turn just like be negative for the business in the long-term as well and so yeah we generally try to take the approach that even if it might disrupt our business if it's good for everyone it will be good for us in the long-term as well. In the short time I think you guys have been around for it's crazy actually you guys started building in for like a year and a half maybe almost two years ago and in that time we've seen you go from early on trading to block building to relaying and now you're thinking really deeply about OFA's in order for execution my question is where do you see Gatica in three years or in five years for listeners today in 2024 that are following you guys that are maybe working with you guys like how should they think about where you guys are going and how to think of you guys? If I had a crystal ball or if I could see the exact future there would be great to always do we don't but overall I think our core mission has always been to be this neutral highly perform an infrastructure provider that can help push the ecosystem forward and whether this is through block construction is today or through launching a relay or building some base sequencing or pre-conferlated infrastructure or other things in the future we have historically been quite good at evolving with the ecosystem together and we'll keep doing that. Yeah so I don't have any concrete answers and there are lots of interesting things that are in the works around attested proposal separation execution tickets, execution options, multiple concurrent proposals and lots of other things but yeah there are lots of questions still open there and clear direction not apparent at the moment. And for listeners that have more questions or want to learn more about Gatica's up to what's the best way to track your progress as you build towards these long-term goals? We on Twitter we on Discord's Titan Builder XYZ's Twitter accounts and we on Discord as well and we generally are quite responsive sometimes we respond and might take a couple of days by the way we are generally open to speak with anyone and so yeah just reach out. Awesome. Kubi thank you for taking the time today to come on in chat about Gatica. You guys growth has been incredibly impressive and it's really interesting to just hear first hand about what that was like. It's been fun some really good questions.