One Hundred Thousand Times Titan

It’s been just over 5 months since we launched our builder and last week we built our 100,000th block!

Since our last update we have been hard at work on all fronts so we thought we’d take this opportunity to give you a quick summary of what we’ve been up to.

We have an impersonator!

How could we not kick things off by recounting the most bizarre story that occurred to us since we started our block building journey?

A few weeks ago we noticed that someone else was building blocks using our same exact block extra-data, effectively impersonating us.

Naturally concerned with what was going on, we spent quite some time trying to figure out what they were up to. It turns out that they were building blocks using only public mempool transactions (no bundles). In order to win the block auctions they sent the block rewards to our address (titanbuilder.eth), which was set as the fee recipient. They were then paying the proposer from titanpayload.eth, an address of their own that they must have registered to try and impersonate us, but that we have no association with.

In total, they sent us over 20 ETH and then decided to move on and start impersonating other builders once they ran out of funds on the titanpayload.eth address.

Once we’d realised what was going on - we tweeted about it to alert the community, which sparked a bit of speculation on the motive and identity of our impersonator.

Who are they? Why are they impersonating us? The TL;DR is: we have no idea on both counts, but we thank the impersonator for their kind donation.

All jokes aside - this was a pretty scary event and it highlighted the shortcomings of the current way of presenting a builder’s identity with plaintext extraData, that anyone can use. Several alternative approaches are currently being discussed on how to make this more secure, and some interesting proposals have been put forward by the community.

As an interim measure, we have updated our Docs to include the full list of builder pubkeys that we use to submit blocks - you can find these here.

Other Updates

We are almost ready to release a handful of new features that we’ll talk about in a separate post, however we wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that our website has had a complete facelift. If you haven’t seen it yet, head on over to titanbuilder.xyz.

Thanks to several performance and reliability improvements, our block-inclusion has also significantly improved in recent weeks, as we’ve been averaging >20% market-share.

That being said - our analytics show that 40% of Searchers are still not sending us their bundles! If you happen to know any Searchers that still don’t send bundles to us, please tell them to get in touch with us via Twitter or Discord, or share this link.

That’s all for now - thanks for taking the time to read if you’ve made it this far and stay tuned for some exciting updates over the next few weeks - we’re only just getting started!