Let’s skip the market update for now and cover a basic concept. Who assembles Ethereum’s blocks—do validators choose the order themselves? Put simply, proposer-builder separation (PBS) means that “assembling the transactions in a block” and “proposing and signing the block” are handled by two different types of participants. If you run your own validator, make sure you understand who operates the relays you connect to and what filtering rules they apply; don’t focus only on the bids. For blocks produced through MEV-Boost, builders must use $ETH to pay a bid to the validator proposing the block.