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Overview

This section describes how transactions are ordered on the Base networks. The ordering is separate from the UX, for example the sequencer could be building Flashblocks every 200ms, without these Flashblocks being exposed publicly. In this scenario, block ordering would change but the user experience would remain consistent.

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Configurations

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Flashblocks

Blocks are built using base-builder with priority fee auctions occurring every 200ms. This reduces effective block times from 2 seconds to 200 milliseconds through preconfirmations. There are three key differences from vanilla ordering:
  1. Timing — Flashblocks are built every 200ms, each ordering a portion of the block. Once built and broadcast, transaction ordering is locked. Later-arriving transactions with higher priority fees cannot be included in earlier Flashblocks.
  2. Gas Allocation — Each Flashblock has an incrementally increasing gas budget. Flashblock 1 can use 1/10 of the block gas limit, Flashblock 2 can use 2/10, and so on until Flashblock 10 has access to the full limit.
    FlashblockAvailable Gas
    1~40M gas (1/10)
    2~80M gas (2/10)
    3~120M gas (3/10)
    ……
    10~400M gas (full)
    Because gas is allocated cumulatively, a transaction must fit within the budget available at the Flashblock it’s selected for. Base’s per-transaction gas maximum (~16.7M) is below Flashblock 1’s ~40M budget, so any valid transaction can be included starting from the first Flashblock.
  3. Dynamic Mempool — The builder continuously accepts new transactions while building each Flashblock. This minimizes inclusion latency but means transactions are ordered by fee at the time of selection, not globally across all transactions that arrive during the 200ms window. A late-arriving high-fee transaction may appear after an already-committed lower-fee transaction.
    This is a deliberate tradeoff: faster inclusion at the cost of occasionally “breaking” expected priority gas auction (PGA) ordering within a Flashblock.

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Vanilla

Blocks are built every 2s by base-reth-node. Transactions within those blocks are ordered by priority fee.