Marlin Biweekly 1 Dev & Community Updates – September 2021

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

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

- The mev-inspect-py tool has been repurposed to work with go-ethereum based clients and has been used to successfully detect arbitrages on Polygon. Efforts are underway to submit PRs to upstream.

- The Ethereum and Polygon gateways have been updated to work with eth/66 protocol.

- Contracts are being deployed and tested on Arbitrum. We are still working out what a potential migration would look like.

- Cancellation functionality was added to the bridge.

Community Updates

- Introduced MEV support for Polygon!

You will now be able to send bundles to bor.txrelay.marlin.org just as you would to relay.flashbots.net.  

Target users:

🧙 Validators in the Polygon network looking to increase their income by including MEV bundles.

🤓 dApp devs who want to protect user's txs from frontrunning.

👀 MEV searchers interested in prioritizing bundles.

🐟 The bundle format and transaction ordering rules remain as they are on Flashbots Ethereum. Validators will be required to run mev-bor (https://github.com/marlinprotocol/mev-bor) which is based on mev-geth.

✅ Users, devs & validators interested in participating in the alpha release can register their interest by filling this form (https://forms.gle/h7gy9NsCFAiNnndT8).

🤓 Instructions for validators to install the gateway to enable communication between mev-bor and the Marlin relay can be found in our docs (https://docs.marlin.pro/books/polygon-gateway/page/overview-033).

💰 mev-inspect on ETH suggests that over USD 711m has been extracted since the start of 2020. We’re expanding mev-inspect to add support for Polygon-based dapps to analyze MEV opportunities in Polygon and are in touch with some other chains as well. 

⚡️ The relay used here will initially be permissioned. Bundles will only be visible to the validator whose chance it is to produce the block. We expect to decentralize the relay and add privacy-protecting features over time in conjunction with Flashbots’ efforts.

Dive in: https://blog.marlin.org/introducing-mev-support-for-polygon 

Spread the word: https://twitter.com/MarlinProtocol/status/1435129457241518083 

- Governance Proposals

Put two governance proposals up for vote:

1. The proposal to update the MPond-Pond bridge parameters was passed.

MPond requests placed can now be converted to POND linearly over the course of 182 days after the date of the conversion request (0.55% will be eligible for conversion every day over 182 days). 

Conversion requests can be placed via the bridge.

Points to note regarding placing MPond conversion requests:

1. 1. New conversion requests placed after the proposal passed will follow the new conversion parameters (0.55% eligible for conversion after the request is placed).
   2. The 0.55% that is eligible accumulates over a period of time. Example: 9.90% will be eligible for conversion after 18 days.
   3. For users who have placed MPond conversion requests more than 180 days ago, the new conversion parameters will apply from the 181st day. 
   4. MPond conversion requests placed before the passing of this proposal fall under the earlier conversion parameters (until the first 180 days have passed). In this situation, users may want to cancel those MPond conversion requests and place a new one. Users who want to cancel their earlier MPond conversion requests can refer to this guide. The cancel feature will be integrated into the bridge UI over the next few days.
   5. Reach out to us on Discord if you face any issues/require support.

2. Proposal to rebalance the reward distribution formula for POND and MPond delegators did not pass due to insufficient votes.

- Operator statistics on our staking portal!

Brightlystake has created statistics page for all operators running clusters on Marlin.

Users can view historic information about an operator by tapping on the statistics button on https://app.marlin.pro/relay/operator.

Data shown: 

1️⃣ APR for POND and MPond for the past 7 days

2️⃣ Tickets and Latency Score for the past 7 days

3️⃣ Fees and Returns

4️⃣ Daily Averages for tickets, latency score, POND/MPond APR and average ranks for that day.

5️⃣ Today's average and overall average for APR, latency score and tickets.

- Staking Stats

Over 930 million POND has been staked in the form of MPond (852 MPond equivalent to 852 million POND) and POND (78 million POND) tokens. Stats can be found here.

Looking to stake? There are more than 60 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 need assistance. 

Missed our updates for August? Here’s our first and second biweekly update.  

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