The power of faster blocks

[0xEvan]

@mevmerlin

The other advantage of fast blocks is that it turns your sequencer into tradfi latency games for searchers. On Arbitrum, I’m forced to co-locate servers to the closest possible proximity, or I’m out of the game. In contrast, while OP’s design lacks elegance, its auction process is way more fair. I can whip up a trading strategy in a few hours, deploy it on OP, and actually compete. To try that on Arbitrum means sinking $10k+ just to co-locate and even have a shot. This dead weight loss is not very good for competition. Im afraid we don’t understand the repercussions of this small block time accelerationism.

I think we could look at Solana as an evolving glimpse of the future, which has ~400ms block times in practice today. The open question I wonder about is - does Arbitrum trend towards Solana like macro behavior on trading flow?