Thank you for those questions!
In reference to the second deliverable, do you have projections from previous implementations on the fees incurred with front-running protection?
Shutter is live to provide shielded voting in Snapshot, but this is currently free (as Snapshot itself is free) and there’s no live implementation of Shutter for MEV protection yet.
Our projection for these fees would be to define a lower and an upper bound:
Lower bound: IT cost for operating the node (comparable to running an Ethereum full node) divided by the amount of front-running protected transactions.
Upper bound: the average expected loss of front-running related MEV which is prevented, i.e. Shutter would act like an insurance against front-running in this case.
For deliverable 2 we’d go deeper and evaluate the specific (or projected) economic situation on Optimism.
Also, if we were to proceed with the study and determine that MEV protection is beneficial here, do you have an idea of the costs for implementation in Phase 2?
It’s quite hard to say at this point, as stage 2 will depend on stage 1 and the Bedrock codebase is still a little bit of a moving target for us. It’ll also depend on how much support we’d get from the Optimism team and/or other teams.
Very rough estimation: ~9 FTE months over a time period of ~4 months with a cost of ~90,000 OP tokens at current prices.
Hope this helps!