Transaction Ordering

CLVR Ordering of Transactions on AMMs ArXiv ID: 2408.02634 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract This paper introduces a trade ordering rule that aims to reduce intra-block price volatility in Automated Market Maker (AMM) powered decentralized exchanges. The ordering rule introduced here, Clever Look-ahead Volatility Reduction (CLVR), operates under the (common) framework in decentralized finance that allows some entities to observe trade requests before they are settled, assemble them into “blocks”, and order them as they like. On AMM exchanges, asset prices are continuously and transparently updated as a result of each trade and therefore, transaction order has high financial value. CLVR aims to order transactions for traders’ benefit. Our primary focus is intra-block price stability (minimizing volatility), which has two main benefits for traders: it reduces transaction failure rate and allows traders to receive closer prices to the reference price at which they submit their transactions accordingly. We show that CLVR constructs an ordering which approximately minimizes price volatility with a small computation cost and can be trivially verified externally. ...

The Specter (and Spectra) of Miner Extractable Value ArXiv ID: 2310.07865 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Miner extractable value (MEV) refers to any excess value that a transaction validator can realize by manipulating the ordering of transactions. In this work, we introduce a simple theoretical definition of the ‘cost of MEV’, prove some basic properties, and show that the definition is useful via a number of examples. In a variety of settings, this definition is related to the ‘smoothness’ of a function over the symmetric group. From this definition and some basic observations, we recover a number of results from the literature. ...

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. ...