Mantis is excited for our new partnership with Primev, a team building a credible commitment network called mev-commit. Specifically, we will be using mev-commit to enable preconfirmations (“preconfs”) from Ethereum validators. This collaboration will allow early confirmations of Ethereum blocks before they are committed, speeding up the Mantis user experience for transactions occurring to and from Ethereum.

Preconfs are a growing concept in the DeFi space. Preconfirmations can be defined as a credible alert that a block confirmation is going to happen.

Pre-confirmations act to speed up the user experience. Based rollups, for example, can offer pre-confirmations. Justin Drake, an Ethereum researcher, states that Based preconfs offer a competitive user experience for based sequencing, with latencies on the order of 100ms.

Indeed, many rollups offer preconfirmation of their blocks before they are committed, i.e. before they are sent down to a data availability (DA) layer. Some mechanisms for enabling preconfirmation of rollup blocks are as follows:

• Soft finality is guaranteed over rollup transactions before they are posted to a DA layer based on the consensus between node operators on a shared settlement layer or sovereign rollup. This only works for rollups where transaction settlement occurs on a separate layer from the DA layer.

• Sequencers are required to post collateral that can be penalized by the rollup if they do not post the block to the DA after a certain timeframe.

For a more detailed overview of the definition and relevance of preconfirmations, read this article by Primev’s Murat Akdeniz.

Primev’s mission is to solve coordination inefficiencies in decentralized domains additively to maximal extractable value (MEV), driving network welfare and increasing transparency and decentralization of the MEVpipeline.

Primev executes upon this goal by delivering preconfirmations in the Ethereum ecosystem. This is accomplished by mev-commit, which is currently in testnet. mev-commit is a peer-to-peer (P2P) networking platform designed to facilitate real-time interactions and coordination between MEV actors and execution providers who exchange bids and commitments. Thus, this platform links MEV actors together to expand the functionality and efficiency of the current proposer-builder separation (PBS) pipeline on Ethereum.

The preconfs delivered by mev-commit benefit a number of ecosystem participants:

• Bidders (including searchers, solvers, rollup providers, end users, etc.): get reliable execution, expand strategies, and can interact with a network of execution providers

• Providers (including blockbuilders, relays, proposers, and sequencers): increase block value, introduce new execution games, provide execution commitments, issue and receive commitments about the block they’ll propose, and accelerate inclusion lists

• Validators (on Ethereum L1): add credibility to commitments, and increasing yield.

For more information on Primev and mev-commit, check out their documentation and blog.