Titan Relay Launch on Ethereum Mainnet
Introduction to Titan Relay
Gattaca is excited to announce the Ethereum mainnet launch of the Titan Relay, a Rust-based MEV-Boost relay built for high performance, geographical distribution, and robustness.
We have rigorously tested the Titan Relay on mainnet for the past two months in collaboration with our launch partners: Figment, Kiln, P2P, and Chorus One.
Today, we are proud to make the Titan Relay available to the general public at: https://titanrelay.xyz/
We invite all node operators to connect to the relay and benefit from the enhanced performance, improved robustness, and greater accessibility in geographical regions that were previously underserved.
We also invite all block builders to contact us for whitelisting in order to start submitting blocks to the Titan Relay. Initially, whitelisting is necessary to manage the load, but we will transition to permissionless block submissions in the coming weeks.
Additionally, we would like to extend a special thanks to Coinbase, Lido, and the Obol Network for their invaluable support during our testnet phase.
Background & Motivation
When Gattaca first considered launching a relay mid-2023, our considerations mainly centered around the fact that relays would still be very relevant in a post ePBS world and that there is a real motivation for builders to vertically-integrate with relays due to the latency advantage, which would destroy the competitiveness of the builder market.
From our perspective, and in line with our commitment to developing and operating high-performance, neutral Ethereum infrastructure, a highly competitive relay open to all block builders and node operators will significantly reduce the advantages held by vertically integrated builder-relays.
Given the significant resources required to develop and operate a competitive relay, we decided to develop one and make the source code publicly available, in contribution to the public good, as the largest neutral builder.
Overview of Titan Relay
Below, we detail some of the key features that set the Titan Relay apart from existing relays.
Key Features
Global Distribution: To ensure robustness, redundancy and speed, the Titan Relay is geographically distributed with nodes located in Ashburn (US East), Frankfurt (EU Central), Singapore (Asia Southeast), and Tokyo (Asia Northeast).
This wide distribution not only achieves lower latency for node operators in local regions but also enhances robustness through additional redundancy and improved block propagation. Furthermore, our coverage in Asia underscores our commitment to expanding into geographical regions that have previously been underserved by existing relays.
High Performance: The Titan Relay is based on an entirely new codebase written in Rust. Further, supporting optimistic v2, which separates the submission of headers and payloads, the relay has demonstrated latency improvements of up to 400% compared to existing optimistic v1 relays.
Proposer Preferences Support: The Titan relay supports various proposer preferences through a single relay interface.
Additionally, we conducted a comprehensive security audit led by Spearbit. Alex Stokes from the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and Matthias Seitz, known for his work with Reth, Foundry, and ethers-rs, served as the lead security researchers. Details of the audit can be found here.
Looking forward
MEV-Boost relays, initially introduced into the PBS supply chain to solve the fair exchange problem between proposers and builders are now recognized as an essential open-source component within Ethereum’s evolving block production market.
We anticipate that relays will provide positive-sum outcomes that benefit the entire ecosystem. Beyond simply serving for block validity and production, relays are poised to create value-additive opportunities that transcend traditional zero-sum MEV scenarios.
At Gattaca, we are not only excited about the potential of relays but also committed to their development in a transparent and collaborative manner. We look forward to engaging with the community to explore innovative ways to enhance existing infrastructure, ensuring it contributes positively to the ecosystem as a whole.
We are eager to usher in this new era and optimistic about the accretive benefits that relays will bring to Ethereum and beyond.
For more information, please contact: titanrelay@gattaca.com