This RFP addresses concerns about the centralization of block production on Ethereum, particularly by top builders who have proprietary information and competitive advantages. The RFP aims to understand the builders' bidding strategies, economics, and behavior patterns in the MEV supply chain. The research seeks to explore topics such as builder behavior, payment funnels, strategic bidding, merging algorithms, profitability, order flow, MEV redistribution, and the macro/systemic impact of block bidding. Applicants can choose specific angles of research or conduct a comprehensive study to increase decentralization and identify areas for improvement.

This RFP focuses on the challenges and issues associated with decentralized governance structures, particularly in the context of DAOs. The RFP seeks proposals to address three main problems: the distribution of voting tokens, the lack of active participation in voting by a decentralized set of stakeholders, and incentive alignment between governance participants and the rest of the stakeholders or system participants. The objective is to conduct theoretical and/or empirical research to examine voting rules, token distributions, and game-theoretic mechanisms to provide actionable insights and guidance for the future operation of DAOs. The RFP emphasizes the need for formal theoretical studies as the primary scope of the proposals.

This RFP seeks proposals to address the limitations of current MEV auctions. It poses questions about the properties, assumptions, and security aspects of MEV auctions, aiming to bridge the gap between theory and practical implementation. The RFP emphasizes the need to ensure censorship resistance, incentive compatibility, and user preference enforcement in MEV auctions.

This RFP seeks researchers to investigate and optimize fee structures for Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)-based systems. The proposal calls for a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical research, aiming to design efficient fee mechanisms for ZK-Rollup architectures. The objective is to minimize transaction fees while maintaining high throughput and low latency. There are several key areas of investigation, including rollup semantics, ZKP cost versus batch size, transaction fee anatomy, ideal VC properties, and fee market mechanism design. The research should provide formal and empirical reasoning for optimizing transaction costs in different settings and propose improvements to existing fee market designs.

This RFP seeks mechanisms to address the challenge of state growth in public blockchains. It calls for a pricing mechanism that accounts for cumulative resources like storage and offers design tradeoffs such as state rent versus expiry. The project should include empirical analysis of state growth in specific blockchains and simulated analysis of the proposed mechanism. The goal is to understand the impact of state growth on sync time and throughput and to improve blockchain performance. The RFP suggests exploring existing frameworks for multidimensional resource pricing as a starting point.

This is an RFP focused on the implementation of various proposed DeFi mechanisms. This RFP has three primary goals: comparing practical performance to theoretical claims, identifying implementation details that affect performance, and addressing security issues during development. Despite the abundance of research on improving DeFi protocols, many proposals remain unimplemented due to various reasons. This RFP aims to bridge the gap by providing reference implementations of valuable mechanisms, even if they are not widely adopted due to technical complexity or economic considerations.