Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)

Multiblock MEV opportunities & protections in dynamic AMMs ArXiv ID: 2404.15489 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in Constant Function Market Making is fairly well understood. Does having dynamic weights, as found in liquidity boostrap pools (LBPs), Temporal-function market makers (TFMMs), and Replicating market makers (RMMs), introduce new attack vectors? In this paper we explore how inter-block weight changes can be analogous to trades, and can potentially lead to a multi-block MEV attack. New inter-block protections required to guard against this new attack vector are analysed. We also carry our a raft of numerical simulations, more than 450 million potential attack scenarios, showing both successful attacks and successful defense. ...

Towards a Theory of Maximal Extractable Value II: Uncertainty ArXiv ID: 2309.14201 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is value extractable by temporary monopoly power commonly found in decentralized systems. This extraction stems from a lack of user privacy upon transaction submission and the ability of a monopolist validator to reorder, add, and/or censor transactions. There are two main directions to reduce MEV: reduce the flexibility of the miner to reorder transactions by enforcing ordering rules and/or introduce a competitive market for the right to reorder, add, and/or censor transactions. In this work, we unify these approaches via \emph{“uncertainty principles”}, akin to those found in harmonic analysis and physics. This provides a quantitative trade-off between the freedom to reorder transactions and the complexity of an economic payoff to a user in a decentralized network. This trade off is analogous to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem and demonstrates that sequencing rules in blockchains need to be application specific. Our results suggest that neither so-called fair ordering techniques nor economic mechanisms can individually mitigate MEV for arbitrary payoff functions. ...