Offchain Labs is updating the Timeboost reserve price from 0.001 ETH to 0.0075 ETH in response to observed market behavior and changes in dynamic across how different market participants are interacting with the system. This change was authorized by the Constitutional AIP: “Proposal to adopt Timeboost, a new transaction ordering policy” approved on March 29 2025.
This adjustment is intended to maintain the integrity and efficiency of the Timeboost mechanism.
Key points:
The reserve price will be adjusted to address market behavior
We reserve the right to make further adjustments as participant strategies evolve
These changes are part of our ongoing commitment to ensure fair and competitive market dynamics
We will continue to monitor participant behavior closely and make additional modifications as needed to maintain a healthy and competitive Timeboost auction environment.
In addition, the Offchain Labs team is also dedicating research resources to exploring alternatives that can maintain a healthy balance between designing the best trading experience for Arbitrum users and the realization of DAO revenue associated with these activities. We will continue to update the DAO and community as those efforts progress and welcome continued community feedback.
What is the rationale behind the increase of almost x8? Would be interesting to understand model and rationale here (which is likely the optimum of demand vs costs). The 0.001 at this point seems extremely low, and was likely a concious choice to have a test on the broad market, which is totally fine. Still, would be interesting to understand why this big increase.
how would this change update the estimation of how much revenue will timeboost generate for the DAO in its first year? anywhere near close to the numbers @BlockworksResearch published more than a year ago?
Entropy has been monitoring Timeboost metrics closely and has remained in active dialogue with the Offchain Labs team to ensure that they know our resources are available to them if needed to help fine-tune Timeboost.
We are strongly in support of OCL’s decision to make adjustments to the reserve price. As shown in the below chart, Kairos has been winning every single auction since February 13th, which signals a less than ideal competitive market dynamic.
As a result, the max executed price for the rights to the express lane has fallen dramatically (chart 1), which is directly impacting DAO revenue derived from Timeboost (chart 2).
Increasing the reserve price should have a positive impact on DAO revenue, but we will need to monitor the auction results (such as the number of bidders and number of empty rounds) after the change has been implemented to evaluate how the changes impact auction participants’ behavior. This will help provide a new benchmark to assess if an additional change to lower or further raise the reserve price is necessary.
Given that OCL is already granted the ability by the Arbitrum DAO to make adjustments to Timeboost parameters, going forward we are also supportive of OCL making changes as frequently as needed to ensure Timeboost is operating as optimally as possible.
if we continue to continuously move the goalposts of this game, without prior notice and in an arbitrary fashion, we might find ourselves holding a game without any players in it.
