Our latest paper, EVM Workloads in the Wild, has been accepted at AFT '26 in London. Gas metering assumes that execution conditions are stable. We measure the extent to which that assumption fails, on Ethereum and Base. More details below 👇

Ever wondered how big blockchain peer-to-peer networks are and where the nodes are running from? Check out our paper at SBC. We conducted the largest measurements of peer-to-peer networks, measuring 36 networks since December 2024.

The final talk from @category_xyz of the day is presented by @amituiuc on how to improve prior batch threshold encryption constructions from quadratic to quasilinear computational cost in the batch size.

Now it‘s time for @kalpturer (a former Category Labs intern) to talks about how MEV creates timing games in responsive protocols and how to mitigate them with dynamic block rewards.

.@komasito55 takes the stage at SBC to talk about Forget-IT: the first information-theoretic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm achieving optimal good-case latency together with quadratic message complexity per view.

6 of 34 papers at SBC this year are co-authored by Category Labs researchers. We're at Stanford all week, presenting across the main program, the MEV Workshop, and the Whitepaper Reading Club. Schedule below. Come say hi!

Category Labs engineer @0xhaythem shares an open source dashboard for PropAMM's on Monad, featuring a rich set of realtime metrics like volume, spreads, markouts and gas costs. If you'd like to add your Monad PropAMM, open a PR:

Monad Foundry v1.7.1-monad-v1.0.0 is out (thanks @0xhaythem)! It rebuilds Monad's Foundry fork on top of upstream Foundry v1.7's generic network and EVM architecture, so Monad developers can immediately benefit from the improvements: testing and fuzzing upgrades, Forge and Cast enhancements, performance work, and cheatcode and EVM-forking correctness fixes. Note: the version schema changed, so everyone will need to (re)install the one-time launcher, covered in the release notes:

Category Labs is proud to introduce Cadence, our multiple-concurrent-proposers (MCP) consensus protocol that matches the optimal good-case latency of single-leader consensus while supporting arbitrarily short block intervals. When combined with BTX, our design for encrypted mempools, this represents a significant step towards solving the problem of MEV at the protocol level. In nearly every blockchain today, a single party ends up in control of each block: it decides which transactions get in, and can reorder them at will. MCP is the natural fix, but most recent designs pay for it with a separate aggregation phase, adding two extra communication rounds per block. Cadence makes the proposers part of consensus itself. Its fast path finalizes in an optimal three communication rounds, even when proposers are offline. Cadence also offers speculative finality, similar to MonadBFT, after just two rounds, revertible only if a proposer provably equivocated. In a simulation using estimated network delays between Monad mainnet's 200 globally distributed validators, finalization takes 219 ms on average, speculative finality 167 ms. Cadence pushes pipelining to the extreme: each block is proposed and finalized in its own independent consensus instance, without waiting on preceding blocks. The block interval then becomes a protocol parameter that can be arbitrarily small. At our initial target of 100 ms, a transaction waits on average just 50 ms to enter a proposal, and oracle prices, liquidations, and auctions can update every 100 ms. Cadence dynamically throttles the opening of new instances to bound the number of outstanding slots even during periods of network instability. When the network is healthy (under synchrony), a transaction included by an honest proposer can be neither dropped nor deferred (short-term censorship resistance), and no proposer can see the others' proposals in time to react (hiding). We prove both, together with safety and liveness under partial synchrony at the optimal 3f+1 fault bound. The Cadence protocol is modular: each module is simple on its own, and any of them can be swapped out without touching the rest. Cadence also builds on components already being deployed: proposals are disseminated as erasure-coded chunks over Deterministic RaptorCast, now rolling out on Monad, and validators vote on proposal digests, so voting does not wait for the full data to arrive. Start with the interactive tutorial: Full paper: Joint work by Kushal Babel, Fatima Elsheimy, Lioba Heimbach, Mohammad Mussadiq Jalalzai, Tobias Klenze, Jovan Komatovic, Jason Milionis, Mike Setrin, and Victor Shoup.

Update to the announcement below: Category Labs is expanding the potential open-market purchase authorization up to $80 million and extending the period through the end of 2026. Any purchases, if made, may be initiated, suspended or discontinued at our discretion and will be conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. This update does not constitute a commitment to acquire any specific amount of tokens, but reflects our intent to consider opportunistic purchases depending on market conditions.