Disagree here. Social consensus on a complex topic like MEV is simplified immensely with a dedicated committee that can make recommendations and provide supporting evidence for those recommendations. There are tons of instances in Cosmos history where we’ve relegated certain responsibilities to validators by default and they haven’t risen to the occasion. A few examples:
- Auditing of code releases for upgrades (or in the case of Osmosis, Stargaze, and Kujira, permissioned cosmwasm application launches), which resulted in many bugs getting through on various chains and apps.
- Failure by the Cosmos Hub to execute a social slash on two validators who equivocated on a consumer chain
- Governance participation in general
I don’t think it’s fair or desirable to assign this responsibility to the validator set. I’d also be willing to bet that most validators don’t actually want this responsibility. That aside, and as I mentioned in another post, it’s important to execute on social slashing consequences quickly, or you risk punishing delegators that weren’t delegated to that validator at the time of the malicious event (in this case, the MEV event). The odds of this happening go way down without a dedicated committee in charge of making these recommendations.
It looks to me like the committee is as large as it is to address this concern. You want to have a larger number of people to keep each other accountable and ensure honesty and transparency in the process.
I’m wary of social slashing as a concept in general, but this issue is so important that I feel it’s worth it in this case. MEV has the potential to substantially impact trading volume and protocol revenue for the v4 chain. We shouldn’t leave enforcing rules aimed at preventing it to an uncoordinated valset with no specific mandate.