Nine months ago, we applied for a grant from the newly formed PBS Foundation. Our initiative aimed to educate the Latam community about MEV. Our goals were:
A couple of weeks later we received a message from Eugene Leventhal that out proposal was accepted. Our journey into this subject revealed that MEV-related topics are some of the most complex and obscure areas of Ethereum. Before to dive dive into our presentations and reports we asked different group of people if they knew about MEV, most of them answered a cold “No”.
During the first report we gathered tons of feedback from different people in the ecosystem, Barnabé Monnot recommend us to include Execution Tickets, Skylar recommend us to have in mind people with no technical background. One of the things that we would appreciated from the PBS Foundation team was to receive feedback on our outlines. We looked for feedback in the Flashbots Collective but unfortunately we neither receive feedback. Despite this, we asked to people in the community how this first report whould be approached. With this in mind we decided to create a first report called “Estado del Mev” (State of MEV) in which we covered the fundamentals of MEV to introduce latam people in a simple way.
With this first report we organized several Twitter spaces and two meetups in Honduras and Colombia. The first meetup was held in San Pedro Sula as a side event from ETHLatam (full report here). This meetup was a collaboration with Scroll and SearchOnDora and we introduce participants to MEV, we explained the fundamentals using analogies that help to onboard more people into the topic. Also, we had a talk during the main event and we took the opportunity to present a talk about MEV seen from the stakers perspective.
The second meetup was held in Bogotá, Colombia as a side event from BlockchainConf Bogotá. We decided to host the events as side events because that way we could attract more participants from different parts of the countries and at the same time create long term relationships we teams building accross latam. In the second meetup, we collaborated with Axelar Latam, Nación Bankless and Polkadot México. This meetup held a more technical group, so we decided to take the opportunity to talk about EIP-7732 and debrief how PBS will help to strong censorship resistance in Ethereum.
During these meetups participants asked questions about MEV in L2s, if the attacks were also happening in rollups or if it was only a matter of mainnet. We were aware that MEV in L2s was possible but didn’t know in what forms. So, for the second report we decided to explore how MEV could evolve and be part of rollup ecosystem.
Before to go deep into the challenges of the second report, we decide to host a virtual season about MEV in collaboration with more than 15 ETH communities from Latam. This was a success, our first community call and there was more than 80 participants eager to learn about the dark forest.