NuConstruct: Accelerating the Ethereum MEV market

We led the seed round of NuConstruct, the project that accelerates the MEV market on Ethereum L1. In this piece, we unpack the rationale behind our bet.

Our Core Thesis

The Ethereum MEV market constitutes ~$500M annually, and is poised to grow as TradFi and DeFi continue to merge, bringing trillions onchain. The market composition is changing every 6-12 months, with the latest trends including searcher-builder integration & exclusive order flow deals. The long-term equilibrium currently remains highly uncertain.

NuConstruct is building TOOL (Trustless Orderflow Operations Layer) — a permissionless TEE network protocol. It enables decentralized collaborative MEV searching, intent solving and block building. It also offers 1 second preconfirmations, significantly improving the L1 user experience.

The idea of collaborative solving has been around for some time, with many projects building towards this future. NuConstruct’s team, spearheaded by @0xprincess, has the requisite expertise to deliver the vision, and is laser-focused on shipping. Importantly, they are also committed to permissionless network deployment, which will ensure that builder market competition will be as open & competitive as possible.

The MEV frontier is clearly moving towards positive-sum collaborative searching, and by backing NuConstruct we are proud to be at the forefront of it, accelerating the transition.

The Team

NuConstruct is run by the top Ethereum MEV team, operating since 2020, with each member possessing extensive MSc level backgrounds in Economics, Math, Computer Science and Machine Learning. In terms of prior experiences, Anton Chtepine has been a quant developer for 10 years: from trading exotic financial derivatives at ABN AMRO to serving as a CTO in crypto hedge fund. Sen is a blockchain developer & analyst, with experience spanning traditional & crypto-native investment firms. 0xprincess is a winner of multiple national olympiads & hackathons: specialized in predictive analytics, system architecture and software optimization, he is also a well-known expert voice in MEV space & Ethereum in general.

The expertise, vision and determination of NuConstruct’s team is unmatched — we are very excited to be partnering with them long-term. They are also currently looking for senior/lead Golang devs with EVM development background — if shaping the MEV market sound exciting to you, reach out at [email protected].

TOOL’s features

Between searchers, validators, orderflow providers & users, the MEV space has a complex multi-party market structure. NuConstruct’s team spent a lot of time thinking through the design-space of a collaborative searcher/solver network, and identified openness & low-barrier entry as the critical properties for a healthy market. Quoting Anton Chtepine, the founding team member: "With TOOL we are building a framework designed for security, transparency, simplicity, and a smooth user experience. Leveraging modern TEEs, TOOL safeguards against malicious behaviour and enables a streamlined 1sec sub-slot consensus architecture with immediate execution guarantees. Its low entry barrier allows anyone with a TEE-capable VM to join the network, fostering permissionless and decentralized ecosystem."

Another founding team member Sen unpacks the repercussions of TOOL for the MEV market: "TOOL's permissionless, TEE-enforced network replaces the opaque, relationship-driven builder market with an open auction mechanism where all participants compete on equal terms. TOOL ensures that bids, execution, and value distribution occur in a verifiable and censorship-resistant environment. This transparency not only guarantees that searchers, validators, and orderflow providers interact under the same rules, but also fosters fair competition that maximizes value for all network participants.”

TOOL is also being built with Ethereum’s both cypherpunk & business values in mind; as 0xprincess puts it: “By combining secure remote attestation, state-level parallel execution, and decentralized block building, TOOL not only restores fairness and transparency to the MEV market, but also unlocks higher validator returns, while reducing execution risk for traders. This brings Ethereum's block-building process in line with its core principles of openness, decentralization, and censorship resistance.”

With respect to preconfirmations, TOOL offers 1 second latency, execution (as opposed to inclusion) guarantees, and maintenance of all critical L1 properties such as decentralization, censorship resistance & dApp compatibility.

Towards Positive Sum

When solving a complex problem, such as extracting MEV, the [competition ↔ collaboration] trade-off is age old — competition typically ensures local economic efficiency, while collaboration can unlock global synergies. The searcher & builder markets have been hyper competitive for a long time, since everyone wanted to protect their orderflow.

With TEEs, we finally have efficient tool to cross-share orderflow, without relying on a third party to not steal transactions & bundles. In this new collaborative paradigm, it is also very important to foster openness & competition — to uphold with Ethereum’s original principles, and ultimately make sure that users of Ethereum get maximum possible rebates. NuConstruct has the right team, resources & drive to make this a reality.

NuConstruct recently launched their testnet. If you run a dApp and interested in testing the 1s blocktime UX, or you are a trading firm interested in integrating into the TOOL searcher-net — contact [email protected]. Lastly, make sure to follow @nuconstruct on X to stay up to date with respect to developments of the company.

Eth/acc & onwards!