"Tai Chi": Use private transactions to safely walk through the dark forest on the chain
Original title: "Interview with Xinghuo Xu Xin: Goodbye Front Running, safe travel through the dark forest with private transactions"
Original source: Mechanical Clock
Tomoko smiled and shook her head, as if explaining her childishness to a child: "The whole universe is in the dark, but we are in the light. We are one in the dark forest A bird tethered to the top of a tree, illuminated by spotlights, blows may come from any direction." - "Three-Body Death"
The danger of the dark forest is not the darkness, but the fact that you do not Sneaking through this forest, so are the dangers of the mempool. But unlike in the universe, where a civilization can try to keep its footsteps silent; in a mempool, no transaction can hide itself.
Mempool itself is as bright as a stadium of lights and all line up here Transactions waiting to go into the next block are birds tethered to the top of the tree.
Even if your transaction is the exchange of two stable coins, there are You may be robbed; even if your transaction is just buying 1 ETH, you may be robbed. The only reason any deal doesn't get snapped up is simply that the deal isn't worth being snapped up.
I know it from "Saving Lien $9.6M" Spark Mining Pool’s Taichi project seems to be able to provide a private transaction service that hides the transaction so that it is difficult for the transaction to be snatched away. Therefore, after the service was officially launched, I interviewed Xu Xin, CEO of Spark Mining Pool, who is also the main person in charge of Taiji Network, and asked him to answer questions related to private transaction services.
This interview also brought out an additional concept called " Trading network", if DeFi really develops and grows, the trading network may become an important infrastructure that cannot be ignored in the blockchain field, so when you read this article, you can also pay attention to it as a keyword.
Privacy transaction service
Q: Why can Taiji Network’s private transaction service hide transactions?
Xu Xin:The transaction is in Spread on the open P2P network, the transaction network can also be regarded as another layer of P2P network. Fundamentally speaking, the mining pool, as the packager of the transaction, wants to know that this transaction is also obtained from the P2P network, so the transaction sender has to disclose its transaction to the P2P network.
It is well known that blockchain time is not linear, it is point In other words, each block is an independent point in time. There is an interval problem:
When the transaction sender's After the transaction is issued, the transaction will not be confirmed immediately; from the time the transaction is published in the P2P network until it is packaged into a block, there is a time interval in between, which provides the possibility for front running .
Tai Chi’s solution is relatively simple, and its core idea isSimplifies the entire P2P network, and the transaction is directly transmitted from the sender to the mining pool.
When the transaction sender directly sends the transaction to After the Spark Mining Pool, the transaction will enter the transaction queue of the mining pool, which is not broadcast to the outside world. Therefore, this transaction cannot be seen on the public network, and there is no possibility that a third party will issue a higher transaction fee to preempt the transaction after discovering that there is room for arbitrage in this transaction.
The only problem with this solution is that the Run the transaction, the mining pool is the only one who knows the transaction. But the good thing about this is that if a transaction is really stolen, theoretically the only suspect is the mining pool.
Q: How is the private transaction service charged?
Xu Xin:Not considered yet There is no charge for the problem of over-charging. Because it is not yet sure how it will become, it is better not to commercialize it, because commercialization can easily make this thing deformed.
Projects like Tai Chi are experimental and scientific , because if no one takes this first step, many problems will not be seen. Let's go and have a look first, not to do this for money.
Q: Are private transactions queued and block-produced separately in a certain transaction pool?
Xu Xin:No. Private transactions still lead to the mempool, they are not separated separately, and private transactions are not put into specific blocks.
You can understand that private transactions are a supplement to our mempool. These transactions only exist in the transaction pool of the mining pool, but they are still an ordinary transaction for the mining pool. When the mining pool sorts the final transactions, it uses It is a unified rule,There is no situation where private transactions can jump in the queue.
(Editor's Note: It can be understood as privacy transactions in Waiting in a pool invisible to outsiders, ordinary transactions are waiting in the mempool, but when packaging, the transactions of the two pools are combined and sorted according to a rule; private transactions only need to pay normal gas fees.)
Infrastructure for Realizing Private Transaction Services
Question: What is your opportunity Want to do private transaction services?
Xu Xin:Tai Chi itself is a project with a relatively long history, and we started planning it at the end of 2018. At that time, the purpose of developing this project was relatively simple, to collect more transactions, because this is what mining pools should do.
Q: Why do you want to "collect more transactions"?
Xu Xin:The mining pool itself is the packager of transactions, which collects and selects high-value transactions for packaging.
In order to improve the efficiency of the mining pool, the goal is to pack more value transaction. There are two aspects to achieve this goal. One aspect is the selection method, for example, how do you select the 200 transactions with the highest value out of 1,000 transactions; the second aspect is to expand your pool of 1,000 transactions. The larger the transaction pool , the higher the probability of capturing high-value transactions.
So at that time Tai Chi network itself was built to improve the mining pool Efficiency refers to how to collect more transactions in the P2P network through a centralized network. Our basic logic is to establish a node network and connect to more nodes so that transactions can be directly collected by mining pools and reduce transaction jumps in the P2P network.
Q: You mentioned the trading network earlier, so you can think that the Taiji node network is a trading network. Is the goal to submit transactions to block nodes faster than normal P2P networks?
Xu Xin:Yes, If ordinary P2P networks are understood as highways connecting cities, then Tai Chi is more similar to highways connecting major cities. If you want to drive from one city (node) to another city (node), choosing the highway (Tai Chi node network) will be much faster than the general town road (ordinary P2P network).
In the past, few people paid attention to the transaction network in the blockchain , because there is no concept of rushing, everyone makes their own deals, and there is no competition between deals. Now that there is DeFi, there is a problem of transaction priority.
Q: How did you come up with the idea of adding privacy transaction service to Tai Chi?
Xu Xin:Remember when I After communicating with DeFi practitioners, I feel that the issue of preemption is worth exploring. I thought about the solution, and felt that the easiest way is to not disclose the transaction directly on the mining pool side, so that no one will run away. When the transaction is made public, it is already on the chain, and the problem of rushing is naturally solved.
Q: What do you think of the importance of private transaction services?
Xu Xin:I think it is a very important infrastructure, which is why we will try our best to make it public, so that more people can try or experience it, and see what kind of chemical reaction will happen.
If we believe that the future of Ethereum will become bigger , if decentralized finance itself is very valuable, private transaction services will become a very important thing, it is an encrypted channel. Similar infrastructure is valuable in complex systems.
If you want to run ahead, if you analyze the behavior of the entire chain, As long as the price spread is slightly widened, the transaction will be snatched away. I am not sure whether the solution we are choosing from the perspective of the mining pool is the most perfect, but at least it provides traders with a choice.
If everyone realizes the seriousness of the problem and wants to avoid being robbed, they still have a choice, which is better than before, at least the problem has been solved. I always feel that how to solve a problem is only part of it, and more importantly, this problem can be solved.
Details about private transaction services
Q: If a block containing a private transaction becomes an uncle block or an orphan block, is this transaction likely to be exposed?
Xu Xin:Yes. This point needs to be weighed by users themselves. Taiji can provide options, but traders need to choose by themselves. The uncle block rate of Spark Mining Pool is about 3%, which should be the lowest in the entire network, that is to say, there are an average of 3 uncle blocks in 100 blocks packed, and traders have a 97% success rate.
Q: If a trader chooses a private transaction, will the transaction be packaged faster than normal? Slow down?
Xu Xin:It should be said that the probability of the transaction being packaged will be lower, because not every block is packaged by the Spark Pool. However, in the future, services such as Taiji will be abstracted for use by all blockchain services and all node operators.
Q: What is "abstraction for all blockchain services"?
Xu Xin:You can put Tai Chi's service is understood as fuel additives, not only specific models of cars can be used, but any model of car can be used.
Tai Chi’s service is abstracted relatively simple, all its functions It is all to make the mining pool more efficient, or to make the profit rate higher, so it can completely serve other mining pools other than Xinghuo, and it can also be used On other chains other than Ethereum, but we will experiment on Ethereum first.
Node operators of other chains can use Taiji services, Taiji can help them collect transactions and provide them with the function of private transactions.
Q: Does this mean that other mining pools on Ethereum can also provide private transaction services through Taiji Network?
Xu Xin: Yes, But where there is a game theory here is the question of responsibility. If the private transaction service is distributed to other mining pools, it will be difficult to tell which party is the one who preempted the transaction. So Privacy transaction service is provided by Spark Pool itself, and if the transaction is snatched, then Spark will be responsible.
Q: How can traders use Taiji’s private transaction service?
Xu Xin: Currently these services All are published on Taichi https://taichi.network
We have opened an RPC port, users only need to send the transaction Put it directly into the RPC port, and the mining pool can see the transaction without transmitting it through the P2P network. As long as the transaction fee of this transaction is normal and appropriate, the mining pool will pack this transaction.
Q: How can wallet users who do not know how to program use the private transaction service?
Xu Xin:It is more difficult. Most of the current users of this service are either professional arbitrage agencies, white hats, or security companies.
Privacy transaction service is related to infrastructure, let’s implement it first This technical service, and then consider how to optimize it and expand its use. It may be opened to users of the wallet in the future.
Extension: Transaction Sorting Rules
Ask : What do you think about Miner Extractable Value (MEV)?
Xu Xin: Do MEV or The disclosure of transaction ordering rules is actually to alleviate high transaction fees. Because this makes the rules clear, everyone can compete more rationally and know where they will probably be in the block.
What MEV itself is doing is partly related to transaction ordering , the other part is whether miners can share some so-called arbitrage profits. The establishment of MEV is also to make the whole rules clearer. Everyone is solving the same problem in different ways.
There are many people who can see the MEV sorting problem and have the ability to solve it It's too few people. The solution here mainly refers to two aspects, on the one hand, how to formulate a set of effective sorting rules or schemes; on the other hand, how to implement it from the technical level, This is a systematic project, and there are many steps that need to be coordinated or solved simultaneously. The project can only be completed after many small problems are solved simultaneously.
Q: Have you seen any rules that you think are better?
Xu Xin: We have communicated with many people, but we haven’t found any good ones yet The main reason for the rules is that everyone's understanding of the trading pool is still not clear enough.
The trading pool is dynamic first, for example, as a If a mining pool wants to sort all transactions fairly, there is a premise that I do have these transactions in the transaction pool. This is a big front, but many people don't care about it.
This is a core starting point for Xinghuo Mining Pool to develop Taiji Network: We hope to sort transactions under a fair premise. No matter what sorting rules are used, we need to ensure that all transactions start on the same starting line.
I think all MEV implementations need to build on this premise Otherwise, even if a new sorting rule is established, but the starting point of all transactions is different, then these rules are worthless.
We also discussed with Tushar Jain, the managing partner of Multicoin Capital After some solutions, in my opinion, we should first realize the basic vision of making transactions faster, and then plan how to sort some transactions on this basis.
Q: What is the importance of getting transactions transmitted faster?
Xu Xin: Let’s use an analogy , if the transaction transmission time between the two places is 2 seconds to 3 seconds, the time of 2 to 3 seconds is negligible in the process of Bitcoin block generation, because Bitcoin generates a block in 10 minutes on average; but in Ethereum On average, a block is generated in 15 seconds, and 3 seconds accounts for 20% of the entire block generation process. If Ethereum produces a block in 1.5 seconds in the future, then 3 seconds is the time to produce two blocks.
So if the problem of slow transaction transmission is not solved, then Transactions with slow transmission are lost before reaching the starting line, so there is no need to compare gas fees at all.
Abstracting the blockchain is Blocks and transactions, the transmission of both is currently limited by the physical limitations of the Internet, and what Taiji needs to solve is the transmission problem. We believe that if the blockchain industry develops to a certain size in the future, there should be a dedicated network to serve the blockchain.
Q: What is "proprietary network"?
Xu Xin: Let’s use an analogy , In the future, a submarine cable can be pulled from the United States directly to China, only for the transmission of blockchain transaction information.
It is not worth doing now, because the transaction information on the current chain The value is not so high; but if more valuable information is put on the chain in the future, then the exclusive cable used to transmit blockchain transaction information may be realized. This is the same reason that in securities trading, hedge funds keep their offices as close as possible to the New York Stock Exchange.
My personal opinion is that the blockchain industry will only develop in a more professional, fairer and more transparent direction .
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