[donmezgel]

In Ethereum, as of May 2022, it is believed that over 90% of miners are connected to the Flashbots server. One can determine this by observing that over 90% of blocks contain Flashbot transaction bundles. Adoption from 0% to around 90% occurred almost entirely within 2021.

Flashbots is a single centralised entity. It is funded by Fred Ehrsam’s crypto VC firm Paradigm, although it appears that this funding could be altruistic. Searchers send there MEV transactions to the server with the address https://relay.flashbots.net/ and the server is currently located in Ohio in the United States of America.

[downvotetruth]

flashbots faq seems out of date as relay.flashbots.net resolves to 104.26.10.65 & isp = Cloudflare in San Francisco

[giancarlostoro]

On port 80 that makes sense, but is the actual relay on port 80? Or is it a web API? If the latter then I am not surprised they chose to put CloudFlare on top of it.

[danuker]

I see a JSON error straight on HTTPS. Must be an API directly.

But HTTPS is 443, not 80.

The fact that Cloudflare was privy to all Ethereum ecosystem communication with flashbots gives me the heebie jeebies.

[giancarlostoro]

Yeah had a bit of a brainfart there about port I really just meant presence on the web…

[moralestapia]

Domains resolve to the same IP disregarding port number.

[giancarlostoro]

Unless you have the really expensive TCP proxy from CloudFlare it is typically only used on web protocols.

[moralestapia]

Yeah, I kept thinking about it after writing my comment ...

"Well, but maybe if you ..."

But I've never seen it in the wild.

[latchkey]

The backend could still be in Ohio. Just fronted by CF. Which is centralized.