- Published on
Making Ethereum Continuous
- Authors
- Name
- merkle
- @merkle_mev
The problem
Chains are slow and discrete in time. A block happens every X seconds. There is a natural limit to how small this interval is, in theory it's roughly the round trip of a packet around half of the earth, which is minimum ~200ms. In practice, less than 2 seconds is almost impossible. Users have to wait until their transaction is finalized in a block to proceed with other activities. Trading feels slow and clunky as opposed to centralized exchanges.
However, imagine if centralized exchanges paused after every order to snapshot the entire state of the orderbook and then resumed trading. This is what happens on Ethereum.
We can emulate a continuous chain by having a append-only block builder and a pending-state RPC.
The solution
On Ethereum, we have PBS (Proposer Builder Separation) whichs allows anyone to propose a block for a specific slot.
However, today all block builders work exactly the same way as before the merge. They aggregate bundles, sort by value and then propose a block. This is a discrete process.
We can transform this process into a continuous one by having a block builder that is always running and appending transactions to the block as they come in. This block builder would have a pending-state RPC that would allow users to query the state of the pending block at any time.
Information leakage
One of the main concerns with having a continous state is information leakage. If a user can query the state of the block at any time, they can see the state of the market and potentially front-run other users using another venue (different block builder). This is already happening in the public mempool and can be countered with tighter slippage enabled by continous block buildling.
Missed slot
In the event where the continous block builder doesn't win a slot, it would cause confusing behavior for users. A potential solution would be to continously send continous blocks to other block builders as bundles, to guarantee inclusion.
Side effects
The side effects of having continous state, even if not guaranteed are:
- Instant feedback for users.
- Potential price discovery by DEX.
- Less slippage required for traders.
- No front-running attacks.