This is a recording from our second Protocol Symposium sessions.

Last week, Lily from Astria Labs gave a talk for Protocol Symposium on the subject of Application Specific Sequencing Infrastructure and their trade-offs. Like protocol research subjects often tend to, this one has to do with MEV: Applications that are unable to order user operations themselves will often leak value to block builders and MEV searchers. Think CEX-DEX arbitrage or CDP liquidations, being able to include transactions in a specific order can lead to a lot of value extraction. Application Specific Sequencing (A2S) is the concept where applications take control over their own sequencing in order to capture that value. In her talk, Lily presents attributes of A2S solutions and then presents the landscape of a few present and future A2S solutions. The attributes pertain to questions like: who decides which transactions get included, who decides on ordering, can we trust the mechanism, etc. Composability is another important property of these mechanisms: two applications that have their own sequencing rule cannot be composed atomically together the same way they can if they delegate sequencing to Ethereum (or some other layer). Finally, after going through various options, she presents us with this summary table. For more details on each one, watch the recording!

Please suggest what you would like to learn about in the comments. Keep an eye out on our YouTube channel for upcoming Protocol Symposium's.