This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Ethereum’s 12-second block time has long been a sticking point for traders and dapps chasing the speed of high throughput chains like Solana or the UX of centralized exchanges. But a new system called TOOL (Trustless Orderflow Operations Layer) is aiming to change that, and do it without changing Ethereum itself.
Billed as a “middleware” solution, TOOL slices each 12-second Ethereum block into 12 one-second mini-rounds, each with a sealed-bid auction for transaction execution. This approach promises sub-second trade confirmations on Ethereum Mainnet — not rollups or sidechains — and without changes to the protocol.
The TOOL team says the system is designed to process order flow off-chain to offer faster and cheaper execution — without compromising Ethereum’s mainnet security or decentralization.
How it works
At the core of TOOL is a network of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) — secure hardware enclaves used to process order flow privately. When you submit a transaction through a TOOL-connected RPC, it enters a sealed auction where searchers compete to include your trade. If your transaction wins, you receive a one-second execution commitment, even before the transaction hits the chain.
“We enforce transaction privacy and transaction processing rules with TEEs,” pseudonymous founder of TOOL developer nuConstruct, 0xprincess, told Blockworks. They added that “we keep the network live by opening it to all participants that are naturally incentivized to support it: Arbitrage searchers, Solvers, RPC providers, DEX traders and so on.”
TOOL does not rely on slashing or staking to enforce behavior, like an EigenLayer or Symbiotic AVS would. The reasoning, per the team:
“Attackers’ profit and users’ loss for [privacy or fair sequencing] attacks cannot be estimated, and so, it cannot be enforced by slashing any meaningful amount of collateral.”
What to expect
Some may be wary that TOOL places significant trust in proprietary TEEs. If a vulnerability leaks enclave data, the guarantees around privacy and fair ordering could vanish. However, it’s important to note that nuConstruct uses Intel TDX (Trust Domain Extensions), not the older SGX. TDX offers stronger security guarantees and isolation, which mitigates some of the risks associated with SGX.
In the unlikely event of a hardware compromise — which would require both a zero-day vulnerability and physical access to the TEEs — the team believes its system would remain resilient. TOOL’s permissionless and self-adapting p2p nature, combined with proactive defense mechanisms, ensures that the network can continue to protect user transactions, according to 0xprincess.
The team also argues that additional economic mechanisms like slashing wouldn’t help here anyway — and would just gatekeep new participants.
There’s also the question of decentralization: TEEs are mostly hosted on centralized cloud providers today. And TOOL’s fast confirmations only work when validators opt in.
But the team says TOOL is still better than alternatives on this score, and was built “with Ethereum’s first principles in mind.”
“TOOL aims to be censorship resistant and to have unmatched liveness properties due to being a fully permissionless peer-to-peer network,” 0xprincess said.
And for users — wallets and dapps — the UX lift is minimal: “Opting into TOOL is only a matter of changing an RPC endpoint,” they said.
It may be even more censorship resistant that the existing Ethereum roadmap’s Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS), 0xprincess notes: “In the current PBS design, transactions are [gatekept] by Builders and Relays, and if a validator wants to receive high value blocks it has no choice but to receive blocks from those parties.”
Instead, TOOL is positioned as an alternative or successor to Flashbots’ popular MEV-boost. Its first product is a “Searcher Network” MVP, a decentralized network of searchers who compete to find and submit the most profitable MEV opportunities.
NuConstruct has raised $6 million from seed investors, led by Cyber Fund and including Maven11, DCG, Greenfield Capital and Eden Block.
Success hinges on “quickly achieving 50%+ pre-commitment rate on the validator side and aggregating 80+% private order flow in the space in the course of the next three months.”
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
- Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
- 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
- Lightspeed: All things Solana.
- The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
- Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.
