Marlin Biweekly 1 Dev & Community Updates – February 2022

Here are the latest developments for the first half of February! 

As always, our discord server is the place to bug us in case you have any queries or want to discuss all things Marlin and Layer 0. For community-related discussions, our Telegram channel is the place to be!

Engineering Updates

- Deployed the Flashbots relay and successfully landed multiple bundles on Polygon using our custom bribe contract.

- Prototyped a split validator design with separate nodes producing candidate blocks and sealing the final block to mitigate the current SPoF validator setup.

- Added bundle heuristics to the mev-relay to add limits on bundle parameters like number of transactions in the bundle and the cumulative gas limit.

- Implemented a priority queue for bundle dispatch to ensure higher value bundles are preferentially sent to validators.

- Moved the bundle related RPC calls to the mev namespace from eth to prevent exposing other important RPC methods in the eth namespace. The relay and proxy transparently forward the eth_X calls to mev_X to ensure there’s no impact on users.

- Triaged and fixed a bug in mev-bor that was preventing clean shutdowns by keeping workers active even after SIGINT.

- Developed a utility to query when a particular validator is going to be producing blocks next, so searchers can use it to trigger their bots to send bundles. Currently under testing, will be released once done.

- Attestation verification was implemented in the signature-based attester.

- Added sender detection based on signatures to the probes in preparation for Flowmint 2.0.

- Marlinstash has been updated with support for sender detection in preparation for Flowmint 2.0.

Community Updates

- Update on MEV for the Polygon chain

The Marlin node (https://wallet.polygon.technology/staking/validators/106) on Polygon has received more than 165m MATIC in delegations! 

What does it mean for you? 🧵👇

👁 For MEV searchers:

The node is producing ~8% of Polygon blocks at the moment. This will grow as more validators switch to the mev-bor implementation or as the Marlin node receives more MATIC delegations. 

However, 8% seems to be sufficient for searchers to get started.

We successfully landed our first single transaction bundles on Feb 12: 

https://polygonscan.com/tx/0x95a6c3f8f9c5d43bd28031965bd898d42b9ccca6101156b87e0402ef5db1a416

https://polygonscan.com/tx/0x49e993fbfc4fb6fe63b90b505f68a683c62e9a5de70be0b2dd6db54bbb4c86d1 

And also a multi transaction bundle: 

https://polygonscan.com/tx/0x1b75836ebed2dc3470ec3d98a9dc261f378277024450755c71ab7c6437f85519 

https://polygonscan.com/tx/0xba126c5e596c6b4e179ad6e3f37b53e48c06d2f363130931a951a7c5769a27a2 

🐟 For Polygon validators:

mev-bor is running smoothly. It has been producing blocks and been in consensus as expected. We expect mev-bor to generate substantial revenue for validators. 

Join our Discord for onboarding help!

💯 For DApps: 

DApps which would benefit from the ability to prioritize transactions or use a private relay are invited to reach out to us to explore integration possibilities!

The Flashbots relay on Polygon will go live on Feb 21st once spam & DoS protection is made more robust.

Spread the word: https://twitter.com/MarlinProtocol/status/1493276205075755010 

- Staking Stats

Staking is live on the Arbitrum for over a month!

Those looking to stake or run clusters will need to do so on the Arbitrum staking portal in order to earn rewards. Existing users and cluster operators still on the Ethereum network a required to migrate to Arbitrum to continue earning staking rewards. 

Over 772 million POND has been staked in the form of MPond (632 MPond equivalent to 632 million POND) and POND (140 million POND) tokens. The Ethereum staking contract can be found here and the Arbitrum staking contract can be found here. 

Looking to stake? There are currently over 40 cluster operators to choose from.

Our dummies guide should get you through the staking process. Reach out to us on Discord if you’re facing any issues, need to clarify doubts, or require assistance. 

Missed our updates for the previous month? Here’s the first and second biweekly update for January 2022.  

Follow our official social media channels to get the latest updates as and when they come out!

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