Leveraging MEV for Your Customers | Theo Powers - Merkle and Carl DiClementi - QuickNode

all right thank you everyone for joining our next panel here uh we're going to have a conversation about leveraging me for your customers and we've got Carl declen head of devil at quick node and Foo Powers the CEO of Merkel so give it up for them and thank you so much thank you very much for the introduction uh today we're going to talk about me and how to leverage it if you're um an offy providers like what quick Noe does but also if your wallet or a telegram trading bus or any kind of application that outputs swaps and transactions on uh most major blockchains that we support which are on the slides here um just to give you a bit of an intro I'm the CEO at Merkel uh we are specializing in meev extraction and protection on all major chains which are ethereum BNB Bas and Solana at the moment and we help our providers while it's and all the other ones that I mentioned uh protect our customers against front running attacks um more commonly called sandwich Bots and um extract back running which is also called Arbitrage or liquidations on most evm networks and as well as salana um we've been doing this for about a year and a half now we we we've worked extensively with quick node we worked with other RPC providers and a lot of major wallets as well and today we're just going to go into details about how it actually works what it does for you what it does for your customers and how you can leverage it to make good additional revenue for everybody involved and make markets more efficient um why you should care about meev if your wallets um or if your chain or anybody in the ecosystem is that our main focus is making markets more efficient and more accessible for people on Chain by providing you know slippage free trades or or at least the best possible slippage that you can have on the trade by preventing um Bots uh from sandwiching you and also we make sure the correct prices after your swap so that the next person in the block uh also gets a really good price on their swaps um or other things that they're doing on chain um if you look at M over the last few years you know about two years ago when block building was introduced on etherum um there was a massive amount of sandwiches that started happening and users were losing tens of millions of dollars every month uh from just bot sandwiching users and and that's why we decided to start merco and we started working with wallets and oper providers and I think today that number is much lower because we protect protect a lot of the transactions on ethereum um and we started making markets also more efficient on chain all right let's get into some uh more details about how we do all this uh if you're a Searcher and you're in the audience you're doing me searching on chain right now you can go and subscribe to our public feed of transactions and start back running or offering Arbitrage uh that can be captured on our public stream um on all these networks at the moment um yeah and so let's get into some more details about how it can be used by RPC providers so thank you for coming Carl thank you for for joining us today um do you want to describe how we work on quick no and the marketplace and kind of the details of that absolutely so uh I'm Carl D clti head of De quick node I work closely with a lot of our partners um including a lot of our Marketplace Partners um our Marketplace team we work closely with a lot of third parties uh third parties that are offering developer tools typically uh apis one of thing that is very unique about our Mev Partners um Merkel being a primary one is that they overwrite an existing method if a user wants to turn it on and that sounds like a negative thing but it's actually very positive so all a customer has to do is go into their account flip a switch to turn on on the add-on and their existing send transaction API calls now all of a sudden start sending the transactions through their Mev Services um this provides significant value for the uh our customer as well as their end users our customers they might be people like wallets um defi providers uh also uh Traders right and this provides significant value around protection um you don't want to be front run by a bot you don't want to be sandwich attacked and the only thing around chains that this does is provide additional positive value protocols they don't want to have the experience of significant price differentials between chains or between protocols um any Arbitrage is only a net positive for protocols as well as end users um I think that end users are the ones that suffer most from these types of things um I think it's really important that the blockchain be something that is uh access to people and that your average user isn't the person um that's being impacted negatively by these types of things so uh really excited to partner with Merkel around uh offering these Services uh yeah so it's going really well so just to confirm there's no code changes needed at all just like a one click on quick node to enable this add-on which is free you don't have to pay for that at all um and I will also add that you can also sign in through quick node you don't even need to create an account with us you can sign in through quick node and get access to um your cashback account so so any me that we're able to generate from the transactions that originate from your account on quick node uh will give it back to you U and kind of paid off on chain through a transaction very easy no account to create anything um are you able to tell us a bit more about like the growth of you know the add on on quick note and kind of the shift in customer perception around me and and kind of where it's at today yeah uh interestingly it's a lot of Education um we have a guy on our team Jordan who's done a great job coming in on Market place and he's spearheaded an initiative with our sales organization to really go and educate Enterprise customers um our Enterprise customers some of our biggest customers doing the most transactions through our product they uh it's a lot of learning that needs to happen about the impacts of uh me and how they can mitigate it and maybe additional Revenue that they can be earning uh and as we've done that as we've run those programs we have seen significant adoption uh we continue to work more and more deeply on this and they like that rebate sometimes they pass along that rebate onto their users right uh users love that as well so uh that's that's been going really well that education um we have seen substantial growth in the past maybe three months uh coming into this year uh ramping up the number of requests as well as the number of customers adopting and we expect to see well into the uh let's say six digits of rebates to customers this year so that that's pretty substantial yeah absolutely and it's only going going to go up uh with more swapping more volume um the price you know all these revenues is made in ethereum so if etherum goes up um if it you know stops going back down at some point uh we'll make more revenue from that as well and so will your customers um what have you seen is are like the the the most um the biggest selling points and the biggest benefits that customers are seeing from this I think probably the biggest selling point is usually around uh the rebates and it's kind of unfortunate to say but it's the truth right um money is what compels businesses to make decisions um it's nice to say hey uh your users might get a better experience but ultimately if you can tell them hey making this change putting Manpower and uh mind share behind it is going to increase the revenue for your business that is usually what motivates people the most um but I think there is certainly a class of customers that uh on our end so these are usually tooling providers or wallet providers things along those lines that really prioritize their customers and they really care about the fact that um they don't want their customers to um be impacted negatively by things like sandwich attacks or something along those lines yes absolutely um and so far have you seen any kind of downsides or negative aspects of of turning on like M protection or or Revenue not that I'm familiar with um I think that you know we are very excited and we continue to invest in this relationship I am not familiar with any of those downsides and if we're still here investing into it then I'm sure it's going really well yeah know I'm glad you say that I was a bit afraid for a minute there but yeah there is no downsides to having me protection and revenue it's really a win-win for everybody which is why we've been able to grow so much over the last year um and really educate a lot of uh wallets and you know tooling like you said uh we didn't realize that that was just you know there and happening under their noses on the Chain um yeah let's see oh yeah what's the um kind of the best kind of customer that you see adopting this kind of add-on like the the class or yeah I'd say the best customers to adopt are the ones that are doing high volume of rights to the blockchain uh really anyone that that is uh to well maybe not any kind of Rights um deploying contracts something along those lines that might not be the move people who are making Financial transactions of some kind um that might be buying and selling your c20s nfts whatever that is right uh that is the type of activity that is um that benefits most from it we see it usually with people like wallet providers uh defi tools things along those lines um yeah absolutely that's that's that's exactly and interestingly you know uh some of the biggest adoption is coming from smaller accounts um that's why the Enterprise side is really a lot of Education I think there's been a lot of Grassroots adoption which is really exciting for us um and something that we're continuing to lean into that's awesome glad to hear that um what is the quick notes kind of Outlook going forward on muv and and how do you see this evolving with with your customers yeah I think one of the biggest things for us is we work closely with a lot of blockchains on helping them come to uh launch their chain have a successful launch how do they grow how do they get liquidity onto their chain how do they make more Revenue we were just talking earlier about the fact that sequencers end up earning significantly more Revenue through uh meev Services being on their chain and this is something that we want to continue working together on and bringing to more chains that are on quick node um something really exciting that we've leaned into and you know really excited to start adding a lot more circles at the bottom of that uh slide right there absolutely so you see now that in general chains are more aware and customers are more aware of MV in general and asking for it going forward so it's it's really a boost that you guys already set up for this pretty much uh all across quick no and and aware of this technology as well which is um half the battle is getting people to learn about me yeah I think you know the people who are launching rollups these days are Stark are like deeply aware of any challenges that are happening on the L1 um there is still some education usually some of the larger Enterprises that are web 2 Enterprises where there's a knowledge Gap about the struggles but I'd say predominantly the people coming and launching rollups with us these days are ones that understand the challenges in the ecosystem if people are working with quick node it's because they understand that they need reliability and scale and that's something that only we can provide and we love to partner with anyone that can help us make that even more impactful for the chains absolutely customers are very receptive to the whole MV um protection absolutely again you know based on your softball question that you sent over to me no I don't know of any downsides uh it's only positive you know when I first started learning about mvv I didn't quite understand uh the value it would have for l2s um in my mind I was seeing well there's no public M Pool so you can't really get front run as easily uh but as I dug further into it there is significant other benefits uh you can call it the positive Mev um that you can provide on l2s that you surface on things like bass and it still is very impactful yeah I think most people don't realize that me is a service that makes markets more efficient and that sounds like a a loaded kind of statement but it does make dexes uh spread lower it makes prices more align on every Dex and it just gives a better price to customers when they go and trade on any wallet or any chain um today and uh I think we're starting to see people realize that Searchers are not necessarily the bad guys they they actually provide a very uh complex uh piece of software that that solves a lot of the price uh movements and and realigns all all dexes out there and also you know that generates more money for LPS it generates uh you know better prices for customers and we talked about that um yeah I have a question for you flipping the script oh yeah go for it what do you see as the most exciting advancement coming to the meev space yeah I'm really excited for chains to realize that me should be there from day one because it doesn't just provide you know the Arbitrage and and liquidations which are already very good advantages but it also provides a whole different way to land on chain which is not through the public mle but through systems like bundles which provide really good features like atomicity of a SE sequence of transactions it you know gives revert protection actually redu is spam on the network quite a lot as we're seeing a lot of spam on um you know op tax sequencer chains for example because they're so cheap to make transactions Searchers and snipers will just blast every block possible until they hit their Arbitrage or they hit their Snipes um and that's at the detriment of regular users who might just want to do a USC transfer and the blocks just full a Spam and they can't even get through uh so there's a lot of side effects to having a really good M infrastructure and so far the only chain or that kind of is the gold center today is eum and I'm really excited to bring that to every other chain from day one and just it be like a click that it can just deploy and um or or uh yeah and have a very efficient market from day one I think that's what I'm the most excited about in the future are there any major technical advancements coming up on the road map for me technology yeah there's um a lot of work around uh Tes or executed environments which can preserve the privacy of customers more when it comes to extracting me because right now we run a public feed you know which is um kind of we remove a lot of information from the feed but there's still you know people can kind of see who the transactions are about to happen so we're seeing a lot of work with Searchers being in tees and block Builders being in tees and um kind of preserving privacy end to end from the wallet to uh being executed on chain and only being revealed after the fact uh which improves you know execution fairness in the entire system as a whole yeah that's very exciting stuff um I think we're almost out of time so I just wanted to end with this uh if you're an OP provider wallet um and you've listened to this you can see that MB is extremely profitable and also very beneficial to your customers uh please feel free to come talk to us we're at a bo uh at e Denver but also we have we're at mer. and you can send us an email uh or talk to us on Telegram and we'd be very happy to help we can also help l1's um decide and kind of Define their MV strategies especially if you're not fitting into the op stack box but you still want to understand how um it can give more money back to validators and make markets more efficient come talk to us we're always happy to work through some really tough technical challenges um and bring some Innovation to the space yeah thank you very much everybody thank you [Applause]