We are excited to share that Commit-Boost is headed toward audit and production! As an open-source public good, this has come with investment from many teams across the community. Thank you to all those teams for their help and support with Commit-Boost, this would not have been possible without you! More details on this and how others can get involved are below.

Outside of this blog, details on Commit-Boost can be found in this introductory article, ETH Research post, or Commit-Boost docs / repo.

What Does This Mean?

• Ethereum Community: Now has a new sidecar that is compatible with PBS but helps reduce evolving fragmentation risks and can give autonomy back to the validator around how blocks are constructed
• Stakers: Commit-Boost not only provides more tools and modularity to validators; it also acts as a unified sidecar to access conditions / constraints around how blocks are constructed. These conditions / constraints span across Ethereum aligned initiatives and enable the potential for higher rewards. For testing or to get involved, please reach out or check to see if your staking community / pool / operator will be running Commit-Boost
• Operators: Like stakers, you also benefit from running Commit-Boost via more safety tools and supporting Ethereum / potentially higher rewards. If you are an operator and not testing in Holesky, please reach out / see here. If you are already testing and have been happy with the results, please be ready to start running this new sidecar in production
• Module Creators: If we have not been speaking, please reach out if there is anything we can help with. If you are already developing a module, this means we are one step closer to validators opting into your module
• General Community: Learn more about Commit-Boost, provide feedback, submit PRs, and get involved!

Who is Helping Build / Part of the Community?

What started as a project among a few, has grown to a strong community. Commit-Boost is a fully open-source public good backed by grant funding. There are no plans to monetize and no token. It is just software being built by a community across Ethereum for Ethereum. Below are teams that have joined the Community or contributed in some way to this effort over the last few months. Thank you again for your efforts to achieve this important milestone!

• Validators / Staking Pools & Communities: a41, Attestant, Blockdaemon, Blockscape, Chorus One, Etherfi, ETHStaker Community, Figment, Finoa Consensus Services, HashKey Cloud, Kiln, ChainSafe/Lodestar, Luganodes, Nethermind, PierTwo, Puffer, RockawayX Infra, Renzo, Rocket Pool, SSV, Stakely, and Tane
• Proposer Commitment Protocols / Modules: Automata, “Bill” on Inclusion Lists, Bolt by Chainbound, ETHGas, Interstate, Primev, Puffer UniFi, and Tai-yi by Luban
• Infrastructure: Aestus Relay, AltLayer, Blocknative, ConsenSys, Espresso, Gattaca/Titan Builder, Monea, Radius, Rated, Rise, Spire, Gwyneth by Taiko, NodeKit, and ultra sound relay
• Researchers: Alex Stokes, Barnabe Monnot, Frontier Research, Julian Ma, Justin Drake, Lime Chain, and Switchboard
• Community: Alex Obadia, Ellie Davidson, Ephema, Ladislaus, Matt Cutler, Nixo, Logarithmic Rex, Sacha, Sam Bobitz, Sam Jernigan, and Simon Brown
• Grants: EigenLayer, Ethereum Foundation, PBS Foundation, and Lido

Historical Context on Ethereum Blocks

Today, over 90% of blocks in Ethereum are built via validators running an extra piece of software called MEV-Boost. This software allows validators to tap into the proposer builder separation protocol (“PBS”). Putting aside technical details of how PBS works, with the PBS protocol, instead of validators packing the block themselves, they ask another actor to pack it for them (i.e., block builders).

Evolutions Around PBS

While PBS has been widely adopted, it has come with some trade-offs. One trade-off that has started to surface is that the software only allows a validator to ask someone to fill their block and really nothing else. Essentially, when a validator runs this software, even though they have the monopolistic right to pack the block, the validator loses autonomy over how the block is packed. This raises the question, is there a way to still allow for delegation from a validator to an external block packer, but put conditions and constraints around how the block is packed? With this in mind, innovators started to realize that there could be opportunities with augmenting the current PBS protocol to not only let someone else pack the block but also give some instructions to that block packer on how it must be packed.