# Dankrad and Peter Szilagyi discussing MEV

Source: https://x.com/dankrad/status/1791402828210049285
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Dankrad-and-Peter-Szilagyi-discussing-MEV?index=0x66472a1f24ec54beb25140bd5444623d481dbb0497a1543f5b352f9247086956160d51e0
Submitted by macbudkowski.eth on 2024-05-17 UTC, 7 upvotes, 1 comment

## Summary

Dankrad Feinstein rejects the claim that Ethereum researchers design protocol changes to serve monetary interests rather than to build a fair system. He says many researchers take heavy criticism for opposing large ecosystem players, including liquid staking protocols, and for supporting proposals such as taking the issuance curve. He also calls it absurd to say Verkle trees exist to protect stakers' income, noting that staking pools do not care about avoiding the need for an SSD to run the protocol. According to him, the main goal of Verkle is to make running full nodes easier and cheaper, which would allow gas to be increased.

## Article

So I think your criticism sounds like you think we are designing the protocol to satisfy monetary interests rather than to build a fair system.

I can assure you that this is absolutely not how any researcher thinks. Many of us go heavily against the grain and take a lot of flak for opposing big ecosystem players. Our life would be much easier if we weren't working as hard as possible to keep the protocol decentralized an censorship free. I could do without being hated by all the liquid staking protocol (and the same for the people who just stuck their heads out to suggest taking the issuance curve). And yet we are all still doing it.

To take just one example of your points, it's absurd to say that verkle is to protect staker's income. Especially for the staking pools, they don't care at all about not needing an SSD to run the protocol.
The main point is to make it easier and cheaper to run full nodes, while being able to increase gas to allow easier access to Ethereum for all.

## Comments

**sileo.eth**: It's amazing to see two people I highly respect publicly discuss their disagreements. I'm learning new stuff about MEV along the way too, which is the cherry on top.