Flashbots

A research and development organization dedicated to mitigating the negative externalities of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) on Ethereum through open-source infrastructure and transparent block-building markets.

What is Flashbots?

Flashbots is a research and development organization founded in 2020 to address the MEV crisis on Ethereum, where validators or miners extract additional value by reordering, including, or excluding transactions, leading to issues like frontrunning and network congestion. By November 2020, Flashbots released its initial architecture and open-sourced MEV-Geth, a modified Ethereum client that enables miners to include profitable transaction bundles via an off-chain auction, reducing harmful gas price wars. This tool saw rapid adoption, with mining pools representing over 84% of Ethereum’s hashrate integrating it by April 2021, significantly lowering gas fees for regular users by moving MEV auctions off-chain.

The organization structures its efforts around three pillars: illuminating MEV through tools like MEV-Inspect for quantifying transaction impacts; democratizing extraction via open platforms such as the Flashbots Relay, launched in January 2021, which allows searchers to submit private bundles directly to validators; and distributing benefits sustainably, including user refunds for MEV generated from their transactions via the MEV-Share protocol introduced in April 2023. Post-Ethereum Merge in September 2022, Flashbots activated MEV-Boost, enabling over 90%