Ethereum's 'Glamsterdam' Upgrade to Tackle MEV

The current Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) model, facilitated by MEV-Boost, has led to significant market concentration. As of March 2025, just two entities, Beaverbuild and Titan Builder, produced approximately 86% of all Ethereum blocks, creating a functional duopoly. This centralization stems from exclusive order flow agreements, which allow dominant builders to construct more profitable blocks, thus winning more auctions and consolidating their market share. This concentration of power has tangible consequences for network censorship. Following the U.S. Treasury's sanction of Tornado Cash, a significant portion of blocks produced via MEV-Boost relays began filtering transactions to comply with OFAC regulations. At times, nearly half of all Ethereum blocks were being processed by OFAC-compliant relays, which can by default exclude or delay transactions from sanctioned addresses. The economic driver for this centralization is the immense value locked in MEV, which has been estimated to be as high as $180 million per month as of August 2025. In one 30-day period between late 2025 and early 2026, bots extracted nearly $24 million in profit on Ethereum through strategies like arbitrage and sandwich attacks. Enshrining PBS (ePBS) aims to bring the auction mechanism for this value directly into the protocol, removing trusted intermediaries. A key component of the ePBS design is the Payload Timeliness Committee (PTC). The PTC will be a subset of the main attestation committee for each slot, tasked with voting on whether a block builder has released their transaction payload on time. This in-protocol mechanism is designed to enforce builder accountability without relying on centralized and trusted relays. The Glamsterdam upgrade, through EIP-7732, will formalize the builder role within the protocol, making them staked entities. This change eliminates the need for MEV-Boost and external relays, creating a more trustless and permissionless market for block production where payments between proposers and builders are guaranteed by the protocol itself. Beyond MEV mitigation, Glamsterdam includes EIP-7928, which introduces Block-level Access Lists. This feature allows blocks to pre-declare which parts of the Ethereum state they will access, enabling nodes to process non-conflicting transactions in parallel. This is expected to significantly increase Layer 1 throughput and reduce block processing times.