A new paper titled ‘Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why?’ was published last month, showing insightful data on the collaboration between searchers and builders, order flow dynamics, and the growing of private order flow. Below, I’ve summarized some key takeaways from the paper. Full paper available here
The paper analyzed data between October 2023 and March 2024, which shows that 39 different block builder entities won the MEV-Boost auction, producing 1,190,617 blocks. beaverbuild, rysnc, and Titan (BRT) contributed the most blocks, accounting for 34.86 %, 22.98 %, 22.74 % of the total, respectively.
~80% of all blocks proposed in a day are built by either beaver, rsync, or Titan.
Titan has more days with a negative profit margin than beaver and rsync, since Titan is more dependent on external searchers, so the order flow may not be as consistent as beaver/rsync.
Integrated builders likely have a more consistent order flow stream from their integrated searchers. Beaver and rsync are known for running their own searchers.
Only 10 builders have ~1% market share or more. Together, they produced 97.67% of the blocks and earned 83.85% of the 52M USD total builder profit, which means that there are builders outside this top ten which house small market shares, but they’re actually good at making profits.
The diagram shows the taxonomy of transaction transparency and order flow labels. Every transaction has a transparency label (orange) based on its visibility on the network level and an order flow label (purple) determined by its objective. The gray labels stemming from the order flow labels represent the detailed categories that are considered popular providers of such order flow.
- Exclusive Signal: Not recorded in the
