Introducing the Flashbake Flywheel
Our Tezos Flashbake coalition is growing! In the past few weeks, we have welcomed five new Flashbakers.
A Flashbaker is a Tezos baker. In addition to their regular baking duties (creating and attesting blocks), they maintain an endpoint where they can directly receive transactions from users, bypassing the mempool.
Read more about Flashbake in the documentation.
Tezos users benefit with extra privacy for their transactions before they get included in blocks. Tezos bakers benefit by collecting extra fees from all these transactions. However, we suffer from a chicken-and-egg problem: too few bakers are Flashbakers, so Flashbake blocks are few and far between, and relay users have to wait forever for their transactions to be included, so they would rather use the mempool.
Enter the Flywheel
The Flashbake Flywheel uses flashbaker’s endpoints to send them a small tip each time they produce a block. The longer time has elapsed since the last Flashbake block, the bigger the tip.
I am seeding the Flywheel with the 250 tez I received from community rewards in February and March 2023. We are giving away 2 tez a day for 125 days. We are looking for generous whales to provide more meaningful tips for the good of the Tezos ecosystem.
One of the benefits of the Flashbake Flywheel is to act as a “smoke test” of the Flashbake system: it will constantly exercise the endpoints, so bakers will ensure they remain operational, as we wait for an increase in Flashbake usage.
The Flywheel software is also a basic searcher bot: it just sends tips to the next flashbaker without adding any extra operation, but it could be extended to add other kind of operations.
We will refactor the software to make it easier to deploy custom searcher bots, but adventurous coders can already check out the flywheel branch and extend it. A good first searcher bot could monitor for pending Kolibri/ctez oven liquidations and and tip the baker in exchange for inclusion of their liquidation operation. Have fun!
Become a Flashbaker
Flashbake has the potential to reshape Tezos DeFi for the better by making it more fair and more resistant to malicious MEV.
Bakers earn tez fees, but they typically do not earn anything extra from (maybe high-value) DeFi and NFT transactions. An ecosystem of searchers can funnel the value locked in DeFi and art markets back to tez, and help bakers get exposure to some of it. This, in turn, encourages more entities to become bakers and fosters decentralization. Become a Flashbaker today!
It is advisable to run the Flashbake endpoint in a different location than the baker itself. MIDL.dev offers free Flashbake endpoints for any interested baker (we may start charging later). Contact us.
