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Protocol-Enshrined Sidecars: Against Blockchain Minimalism — Ryan Chern

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Novel blockspace is abundant and largely undifferentiated. New protocols should reside on an opinionated point on the protocol design frontier to incentivize desired behaviors. Base layers should enshrine more useful tools for developers to build novel applications without the need for deep infrastructure-level knowledge. Blockchains are inherently social systems that establish credibility by exercising agency over all participants and activities within their scope. However, blockchain participants often rely on exogenous “sidecars” to augment the protocol utility. These sidecars, such as MEV-boost (Ethereum) or Jito (Solana), introduce vulnerabilities that can undermine the protocol's credibility due to their potentially misaligned incentives. To strengthen credibility, blockchains must consider enshrining certain sidecars directly into the protocol, so all participants benefit from augmented utility within a uniform trust and security model. While this might go against the ‘minimalis

Takeaways You can enshrine arbitrary sidecars into the fork-choice rule of the chain. Coprocessors are an example of a protocol-enshrined sidecar. Novel blockspace is abundant and largely undifferentiated. New protocols should reside on an opinionated point on the protocol design frontier to incentivize desired behaviors. One differentiated point on the design frontier is to operate as a sufficiently decentralized “ server with blockchain scaffolding ” – a centralized entity that provides necessary guarantees such as forced inclusion, an escape hatch, etc. Base layers should enshrine more usef

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