The infrastructure project Flashbots is negotiating with investors to raise between $30 million and $50 million at a $1 billion valuation. The Block reports, citing its own sources.
According to the publication, the startup did not solicit venture capital investments as is usually the case. On the contrary, the project expects offers from them.
Paradigm has agreed to lead the round. According to Crunchbase, the firm was a lead investor in Flashbots at the seed stage in 2020.
The startup is developing solutions to democratise access to opportunities for extracting maximum MEV and to protect against its misuse in the Ethereum network.
Infrastructure of the project includes:
- Flashbots Auction — a marketplace for transaction auctions;
- MEV-Boost — an off-protocol implementation of the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) framework for the proposer and builder roles;
- Flashbots Protect — the final RPC endpoint to protect against frontrunning and failed transactions;
- Flashbots Data — tools and dashboards to increase transparency of MEV activity.
According to mevboost.org, around 75% of Ethereum blocks are relayed via MEV-Boost.
In called the absence of a neutral relayer in the network a “failure” of the ecosystem of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
In presented an updated roadmap for the project, in which The Scourge phase appeared, aimed at solving the MEV problem.
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