Delegate Mission Request: Implement a Prototype of an OP Stack Chain with Mempool Encryption

[opjulian]

Delegate Mission Request: Implement a Prototype of an OP Stack Chain with Mempool Encryption

Delegate Mission Request Summary:

Implement a functional prototype of an OP stack chain with mempool encryption to draw insights regarding censorship resistance and front-running protection for OP stack networks.

S5 Intent 15 1: Intent 1. Progress Towards Technical Decentralization

Proposing Delegate: @404DAO

Proposal Tier 13 1: Fledging Tier

Baseline grant amount: 100 K OP (Up to 50 K OP per applicant)

Should this Foundation Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: Multiple

Completion date: 6 months

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Specification

How will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above Intent?

MEV front-running and censorship are vectors of centralization. R&D of solutions that can protect users from front-running and censorship are key to optimize for security, resilience and decentralization. Moreover, advancing towards providing optionality to deploy an encrypted Mempool chain with the OP stack is also aligned with growing the Superchain (Intent 2) and improving the consumer experience (Intent 3), nobody likes to be front-ran or in a sandwich attack.

Encryption is powerful in this regard, because the inability to observe transactional contents during validation (e.g. by the sequencer or other transaction supply chain intermediaries) precludes the possibility of discriminatory processing and thus makes it a lot harder (or even impossible) to front-run or censor.

What is required to execute this Delegate Mission Request?

• Research and evaluate different mempool encryption technologies.
• Assess how these technologies can integrate with the OP stack.
• Define generalized mempool encryption interfaces.
• Prototype and deploy one or more mempool encryption technologies.
• Documentation of the implementation process and codebase.

How should the Token House measure progress towards this Mission?

• Quality of mempool encryption research.
• Assess functionality and effectiveness of the deployed prototype.
• Assess quality of the documentation and codebase.

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

• See total amount of transactions and contracts deployed in the prototype.
• Measure amount of censored transactions using various methodology such as https://censorship.pics/ 1 .
• Total number of OPStack based chains implementing an encrypted mempool.