Part 1: How We Got HereEthereum was initially designed with the idea that a single party would handle the entire process of block creation. This entailed aggregating transactions from the mempool, crafting the block header, and either finding the golden nonce in proof of work or simply signing the block header in proof of stake. For its initial years, block building was straightforward: mining nodes pulled transactions from their mempool, ordered them based on gas price, which signifies the c...