We must accept that centralization defeats the purpose of Crypto, and that without proper decentralization, everything we’ve built, every dollar you’ve invested, is going down the drain.

To zero.

But is Crypto decentralized?

Hell no.

In fact, all of your Crypto investments are actually closer to going to zero than to generating personal wealth for you.

What’s more, we are actually getting worse, as transaction censoring is increasing at an alarming rate and pulling us closer to creating fully-censoring chains.

Just imagine this:

Blockchain, the technology born to mitigate censorship, becoming the same corrupted system we all have grown to despise.

This is the death of Crypto, simple as that.

But some people, people that truly care about Crypto and want to see it succeed, are committed to reverting this life-threatening situation.

A new blockchain, a blockchain like nothing we’ve ever seen before, is coming into existence to solve this problem.

It’s not a smart contract blockchain to rival Ethereum, nor a pure peer-to-peer blockchain to rival Bitcoin, it’s a totally different thing we’ve never seen before.

This isn’t another “great investing opportunity” for you; it’s nothing like that and, at the same time, much more than that.

It’s a project that intends to solve the issues that threaten all of your Crypto investments to inevitably go to zero.

Actually, if people understood where they were putting their money and how big the problem this solution is trying to solve, only 10–20 blockchain projects would exist today.

Unsurprisingly, this is being considered the solution to the Millenium Price Problem of Crypto.

This is SUAVE.

A matter of survival

First, let me be clear on this.

There’s nothing, and I mean nothing, that a blockchain can do that a centralized system can’t. In fact, it probably performs worse than centralized systems.

There you go, I said it.

But wait, why are we then talking every day about something that is a worse version than what we have already?

Sounds almost disturbing.

But of course, this is a nuanced statement.

There’s something that blockchains do, indeed, bring to the table, and that’s decentralization.

Decentralization eliminates single points of failure, increasing data security, immutability, and censorship resistance.

But decentralization is much more complex than having an IT network that’s geographically distributed. You can have centralization pressures at many layers: at the governance layer; at the developer layer; or even at the protocol layer.

And it is at this last layer where things are getting sketchy today.

The protocol layer, the layer where your transactions are processed, is becoming centralized.

The problem?

MEV.

MEV, the silent killer

MEV, the concept of Maximal Extractable Value, refers to the amount of revenue that miners in PoW-based blockchains like Bitcoin or validators in PoS-based blockchains like Ethereum (block builders from now on) can achieve.

Besides block rewards they get for introducing new blocks of transactions to the chain, block builders can perform additional activities that enhance their profits.

For instance, block builders can front-run your transaction, which means that if they identify your trade as advantageous (e.g. you have identified a great buying price for Bitcoin in US dollars) they will create a higher-fee trade identical to yours to get in front of you and steal the opportunity you had identified.

The result?

You end up paying a higher price for that Bitcoin, missing the opportunity to make your trade as intended.

Scammed.

And this is just one example of how block builders indiscriminately profit from you and me to achieve higher MEV.

Furthermore, due to the highly-competitive and obscure MEV market, MEV searchers, entities that search for MEV opportunities, and block builders created private partnerships that heavily increased power and centralization, blindsiding other builders.

Luckily, a group of researchers understood the risks of this issue, and so the Flashbots project was born.

What Flashbots solves and what it doesn’t

Flashbots is an open project to help fight MEV.

With MEV-geth, a geth fork — geth is the main software used to run Ethereum nodes — it allowed for a considerable reduction of these problems.

Further, MEV-boost, the latest iteration of the software, introduces PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation), which separates the building of blocks from those proposing them, reducing the power of miners and validators and preventing censoring.

But how?

As block builders have to compete for producing the most profitable block to be mined/introduced, censoring is economically disincentivized. Block proposers can’t see the transactions in the block, so they can’t censor them either.

But has it really solved censoring pressures and centralization?

Well, partially.

This is for two main reasons:

Let’s see each in detail.

Centralization of block-building

Wondering how decentralized Ethereum really is?

Here’s a fact.

Almost 80% of blocks introduced on the Ethereum blockchain this past week were built by only four builders:

But Ethereum is decentralized, right? … Right?

How about no.

Naturally, although censoring is economically disincentivized, block builders can collude with each other to make sure that none of them introduce censorable transactions.

Flashbots’ relays are OFAC-compliant

The MEV-boost architecture uses centralized relays where searchers send the transaction bundles with MEV opportunities in them and the relays send them to block builders to create the blocks.

As Flashbots, a US entity, complies with the OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US government, bundles with transactions sanctioned by them (Tornado Cash, for instance) are discarded by Flashbots’ relays, never reaching block builders.

This, due to MEV-boost’s dominance as the predominant software for Ethereum nodes, has caused that around 70–80% of blocks introduced in Ethereum are censoring blocks.

Were Ethereum to reach around 99% of censoring blocks, it would become a fully-censoring chain, defeating its purpose and, inevitably, dying.

Luckily, the Flashbots team knows this and is committed to solving the issue once and for all.

The solution?

SUAVE.

The blockchain to sequence them all (you’ll see what I mean by this).

SUAVE wants to make it smooth for all of us

SUAVE is a new blockchain being developed by the team behind Flashbots.

The acronym stands for Single Unified Auction for Value Expression, and the objective is to ensure that blockchains stay decentralized at the sequencing layer, the layer where transactions are ordered and blocks built.

In simple terms, is in this layer where your transaction is processed and introduced into the blockchain as part of a block, for final settlement.

And how are they proposing to do this?

SUAVE architecture

They pretend to achieve this with the super ambitious idea of unifying sequencing across different domains (blockchains), allowing block builders to come together in one unique blockchain.

To do this, instead of each blockchain having its own mempool (the place where pending transactions sit until they are validated and included in the blockchain through a block) they would all share the same mempool, where builders would co-exist in a decentralized and fair market of MEV opportunities.

The objective?

To decentralize one of blockchain’s centralization bottlenecks, block building, and hence avoid the horrifying thought of censored transactions in a public ledger (an impossible contradiction).

And, with this, one of the results is giving back to users.

The power of giving back

One of the strongest features of a blockchain adopting SUAVE would be that, always according to the team behind it, it would naturally incentivize the system to give back to its users.

In other words, instead of the status quo, where block builders take almost all profits, the decentralized and collaborative ecosystem of builders that SUAVE would build could induce it to hand part of the profits to users.

Furthermore, to allow blockchains to participate, they are offering it as a plug-and-play, to streamline integration.

Apart from benefits for users, this implementation could also potentially bring other benefits like:

But, of course, there are questions surrounding SUAVE.

But if there’s one thing a like about this is that it’s just another step forward to blockchain specialization.

Plug-and-play and modularity

SUAVE offers an alternative to ensure block-building centralization.

To me, there isn’t a stronger trend in Crypto than modularity, a trend where simplicity becomes perfection, and where different projects collaborate for the benefit of the whole space.

We don’t know where the blockchain industry is heading, but if we pay attention to where the tech industry architectures are heading, we clearly come to the conclusion that modularity has the highest chances of success.