Vitalik responds to MEV and centralized staking concerns as Venus enters Taurus in sky

Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum published a blog post responding to a tweet by developer Péter Szilágyi who challenges the way that Ethereum has dealt with problematic potentialities, stating that further enabling proprietary MEV builders and encouraging liquid restaking has resulted in Ethereum being akin to “the banking system recreated.”  

When Vitalik published his response on Friday 17 May, Moon was opposing Saturn in the sky and travelling in trine to Venus. This means that Saturn was on the opposite side of Earth from Moon.

Dividing the sky of an infinite radius extending outward from the center point, Earth into 12 equal sections, trine means the planets are at the same degree, 4 or 8 sections displaced from each other. Someone standing in a location on Earth where Moon was rising on the Eastern Horizon when Vitalik published his blog post, turning their head 120º West from the Moon rising would have seen Venus in the sky. 

Vitalik’s readable, straightforward and easy to understand blog post emphasizes that Ethereum devs and researchers have already been actively working on the issues of MEV and staking centralization for several years. 

First, he addresses ways of lessening the ability to capture too much extra revenue by manipulating the order of transactions within Ethereum blocks, which is called MEV or miner extractable value. One way he calls “MEV minimization” and another “MEV quarantining.” MEV minimization is either building DEXs which structure their order settlement in a way that does not allow MEV, or encrypting mempools so there is less information available for block producers to manipulate in order to generate MEV. 

MEV quarantining is outsourcing the ordering of transactions within blocks to specialized MEV builders via an auction, so that solo stakers are at less of a disadvantage compared to large centralized stakers. 

Vitalik mentions that minimizing will not reduce MEV enough, but quarantining should incorporate “inclusion lists” which let stakers, which on Ethereum are the ones who propose the blocks, define transactions that must be included. This way, MEV builders can not exclude certain transactions simply to increase their own revenue. He refers to this as “empowering block producers.”

Regarding staking centralization, Vitalik mentions that devs and researchers have been actively working on ways to reduce perceived drawbacks of solo staking so that solo stakers can make up much more of Ethereum. He goes on to explain several real, technical ways that they have been devising ways which will make it easier for individuals to solo stake.

The planet Saturn, Who opposed Moon at the moment of the blog post generates events that must be dealt with on Earth, including problems which are internal to an organism. The planet Venus, Who trined Moon is known by the jyothish to be capable of healing all kinds of Saturn-related problems and was about to enter His sign of Taurus, which generates liquidity on Earth. This type of straightforward addressing of what needs to be and what is indeed being worked on within Ethereum is a result of Saturn obligating a hard look at the facts and Venus’s interest in stabilizing Taurus, the source of liquidity. This very stance of Ethereum developers which was displayed in Vitalik’s blog post is also the reason why the SEC is likely to approve the spot ether ETFs.