Title: Economic Organisation in the Ethereum Protocol (link to video; link to slides)
Speaker: Barnabé Monnot, Robust Incentives Group
Abstract: A blockchain protocol is run by a decentralised set of parties who participate in consensus formation and block construction, known as proposers. To maximise decentralisation, the cost to execute the protocol must remain low. Yet, as chains settle greater and greater value, a division of labor emerged, whereby parts of block construction became outsourced to sophisticated third-parties, known as builders. Naturally, opportunities and threats exist in such a division. There is an asymmetry between block construction, a one-shot, potentially complex, task, and block verification, operated continuously by all nodes on the network. On the bright side, summoning sophisticated builders may increase the range of protocol features while keeping running costs of verification low. On the other hand, multiple principal-agent problems appear, which the protocol may wish to get involved with. The talk summarises current research into protocol design for a maximally decentralised and efficient economic organisation.
Bio: Barnabé Monnot is a research scientist at the Robust Incentives Group, a research team of the Ethereum Foundation investigating game theory, mechanism design and cryptoeconomics for the Ethereum protocol.