The post Arbitrum’s Timeboost goes live, generates $2,491 in DAO revenue on day 1 appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. More than a year after its initial announcement, Arbitrum launched Timeboost yesterday. Timeboost is a new way of ordering transactions on Arbitrum. That seems pretty boring and unexciting on the surface, but hopefully we can show you why it’s a pretty big deal. Transactions today on Arbitrum are ordered on a simple first come, first serve (FCFS) basis. Seems fair! But it’s problematic in practice: Financial systems need a way to efficiently process transactions. When markets crash, a lending application like Aave needs a way to quickly liquidate pledged collateral before prices plummet further. Since transactions are cheap and not regulated by prices due to the FCFS mechanism, MEV searchers repeatedly spam the network to increase their chances of transaction inclusion. This degrades the overall network user experience. Think Uber without surge pricing. Sounds fair, but then everyone — regardless of their priority — would be calling for cabs, and a pregnant woman in labor who needs to get to the hospital asap struggles to get a ride. Timeboost tries to mitigate this problem by introducing an auction where MEV searchers can bid for transaction priority. The winner of the auction gets their transaction fast-tracked in an “express lane.”  This is roughly how it works: Tony and Janice are MEV searchers.  Both compete for priority inclusion — Tony pays 1 ETH and Janice pays 2 ETH in the auction. Neither knows how much the other is bidding because transactions sit in a private mempool.  Janice wins the auction and pays the price of Tony’s bid (1 ETH). Tony’s transaction is delayed by 200ms while Janice’s transaction receives immediate inclusion in the express lane. Hence the name: Timeboost. Timeboost in effect introduces an optional market pricing mechanism into…

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Filed under: News - @ April 18, 2025 5:17 pm