MEV Boost - Censorship | doing small things measures up

[daGscheid]

Reference:

(This is testnet - for mainnet we offer all https://www.mevboost.org/ relays expect Relayoor for you to pick upon)

"Oh F A C" is what most currently think about the censorship problem the US government infuses into the block space.

Funny enough that doesn't necessarily need to be the case. None of it needs to be. It is competition advantage that plays out in front of us - It is not just: "Look honey, Ethereum is censorsing blocks now because people are greedy lol" it is a setup problem.
The Flashbot relay is the most used by far. It is the most subscribed to, and despite them leaving transactions on the table - it is still manages to be the most profitable one. Reason for that is that most block builders use the Flashbots relay for the reason, that most Stakers/MEV Boost users are subscribed to it.

There are multiple fronts how we could do our part. I want to tackle this and hope that even if we can push the scales by small choices without doing anything drastic (like hurting INFORMED user choice). There are some reasons for users to pick OFAC, for example if they are purely US based.
We want to give Stereum users the best experiences and just removing or resort to even having to hide them would be a mistake on our part. That is not how MEV Boost works. You can select all relays, no matter where they come from or what we think personally about their government. That is why that we should push the user to either select all of them, it will resort to the most profitable one, or make other relays more appealing.

So that is where we should start, make it less appealing or likely from a UX standpoint for the user to pick it, and if we have to, move from there down the line:

less appealing > hide the option > make it a free for all under respectable relays (enable all) > remove the option to pick censoring once in the UI all together.

Here are the first small steps we should take:

• make it fairly obvious who are the censoring once. (US Flag Symbol).
• Add relayoooor as relay option (https://relayooor.wtf/)
• Add Gnosis - Agnostic Relay https://agnostic-relay.net/ to all models
• Add UltraSoundMoney Relay https://relay.ultrasound.money/ to all models
• Randomize List Position

This would result in the following available user selection:

MAINNET

Relay	Censorship Free?	Ethical?
Flashbots	No	No
BloXroute Max Profit	Yes	No
Blocknative	No	No
Eden	No	Yes
BloXroute Regulated	No	No
BloXroute Ethical	Yes	Yes
Manifold	Yes	No
Relayooor.wtf	Yes	No
Agnostic Relay	Yes	No
ultra sound relay	Yes	No

TESTNET

Relay	Censorship Free?	Ethical?
Flashbots	No	No
BloXroute	No	No
Blocknative	No	No
Eden	No	Yes
Manifold	Yes	No

Censorship-free: Will not filter or censor transactions according to OFAC sanction lists.
Ethical: Will not front run or sandwich attack or generally harm other user's transactions

source:
https://www.mevwatch.info/
https://beaconcha.in/relays

[daGscheid]

• Here are the missing icons for the MAINNET MEV Boost relays in rc.12 - if you would be so kind and add them when you can @mabasian

Reference in Mainnet

EDEN

RELAYOOR

Suggesting them randomly on selection will be done next and with this, the issue will be closed for now.

[daGscheid]

Completed with #1066; might get opened again if necessary with rising MEV Boost censorship issues