Blockchain Mechanism Design: Transaction Fees and Strategic Equilibria
Most transaction fee mechanism (TFM) theory—including the foundations of EIP-1559— assumes a linear chain with one proposer per block in isolation. Real blockchain infrastructure has moved well beyond this model: strategic builders can delay transactions across multiple blocks, DAG-based consensus (Bullshark, Shoal++) runs concurrent proposers across overlapping transaction sets, sharded systems must price cross-shard atomicity, and parallel execution engines (Solana, Monad, Sui) remove ordering constraints while introducing new strategic manipulation via conflict graphs. This direction asks which classical TFM desiderata survive these architectural changes and what new mechanisms are needed to restore incentive compatibility, user welfare, and revenue adequacy. It also studies incentive design for parallel execution: whether conflict injection can be detected and penalized, how MEV manifests under parallelism, and what validator compensation models are viable when transaction ordering is no longer the primary strategic lever.