Do you want to learn about MEV (Miner Extracted Value a.k.a. Maximum Extractible Value). Listed below is everything you always wanted to know about MEV. Read different opinions and listen to what other in the industry are talking about. Consider joining the Flashbots discord server (link below).
Use one of the links below to navigate to a section of the MEV page you are most interested in.
- Articles and research reports about MEV
- Technical documentation and code repositories
- Podcasts about MEV
- Videos about MEV
- Social media focused on MEV
- Tutorials on Searcher strategies used to extract MEV
Articles and research reports about MEV
| Name of Article | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Ethereum is a Dark Forest | Paradigm | What is the Dark Forest? Obfuscating transactions from bots. Lessons learned and thoughts on the future. |
| MEV in ETH 2 – An early exploration | HackMD | A study of transaction ordering in ETH 2 and analyzing MEV enabled staking yields. MEV might increase validator rewards but possibly reinforce inequalities among participants of ETH 2. |
| MEV and EIP-1559 | HackMD | Miners economics and the increased incentive for MEV extraction. Auction and Flashbot ethics. They found no critical way in which EIP-1559 interacts with MEV extraction. |
| A Snake in the Garden | HackMD | The rise of on-chain financial infrastructure on Ethereum has led to an emergent property called Miner Extractable Value (MEV). The default rules in standard Ethereum clients order transactions based on their gas price (ties being broken by time arrived) but MEV has led to more sophisticated custom clients and auction mechanisms. |
| Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest? | Cornell University | Evidence that miners already extract Miner Extractable Value (MEV), which could destabilize the blockchain consensus security, as related work has shown. |
| Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges | Cornell University | Details the complex risks created by transaction ordering dependencies in smart contracts and the ways in which traditional forms of financial-market exploitation are adapting to and penetrating blockchain economies. |
| Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges | Cornell University | Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges. Evaluations shows that AMM frees up 32.8% block-space of AMM-related transactions. AMM revenue reduces swap fees by 90%. |
| Maximizing Extractable Value from Automated Market Makers | Cornell University | Maximizing Extractable Value from Automated Market Makers. They addressed the problem of adversaries extracting value from AMMs interactions to the detriment of users. |
| Frontrunner Jones and the Raiders of the Dark Forest: An Empirical Study of Frontrunning on the Ethereum Blockchain | Cornell University | This paper proposes a methodology that is efficient enough to detect displacement, insertion, and suppression attacks on Ethereum’s past transaction history. They run an extensive measurement study and analyze frontrunning attacks on Ethereum for the past five years. They identify a total of 199,725 attacks, 1,580 attacker accounts, 526 bots, and over 18.41M USD profit. They demonstrate that the identified attacker accounts and bots can be grouped to 137 unique attacker clusters. They discuss frontrunning implications. |
| Cyclic Arbitrage in Decentralized Exchanges | Cornell University | First, the author provide a systematical understanding of cyclic arbitrage, with the theoretical analysis of the arbitrage model, the measurement of exploitable arbitrage opportunities, the measurement of exploited cyclic arbitrage, and the measurement of cyclic arbitrage implementations. Second, the author provides the measurement of state-of-the-art interms of (cyclic) arbitrages in DEXs. Finally, we reveal that blockchain technology enables users to explore more trading strategies. Further studies in DEXs may provide us with novel understandings of user behaviors in financial markets. |
| Flashbots: Frontrunning the MEV crisis | ethresear.ch | Front running the MEV crisis. Information and design goals about MEV-GETH. How it works and what is Flashbots. |
| MEV-SGX: A sealed bid MEV auction design | ethresear.ch | What is MEV-SGX? What is its architecture and process. What are MEV-SGX limitations. |
| MEV-Boost: Merge ready Flashbots Architecture | ethresear.ch | This article outlines the design for a marketplace for block construction this is compatible with the upcoming Ethereum merge fork. This trust based solution closely resembles the current Flashbots auction design 66 with modifications to enable solo staker participation without introducing changes to Ethereum consensus. This solution aims to bridge the gap to a permissionless PBS design 52 which should be strongly considered for the cleanup fork in order to improve decentralization. |
| Ethereum’s Value Extracting Bots: Explainer and Project Map | The Defiant | Information on Flashbots, KeeperDAO, Secret Network and ArcherDAO. |
| Anatomy of an MEV Strategy: Synthetix | Robert Miller | Rob Millers process of execution on an MEV opportunity. Identify the opportunity, understand the opportunity. Create a contract. Plan an execution. |
| Tokenizing MEV | Multi Coin Capital | The use of the EDEN token as a coordination unit in block construction has enabled a more fair, open, and consistent distribution of MEV across Ethereum network participants. |
| Eden Block Production | Eden Network | The Eden Network adds additional transaction ordering rules on to the existing rules to produce valid Ethereum blocks, including the requirement for all transactions to pay the base fee in ETH being introduced by EIP-1559. |
| The Hidden World of Ethereum Snipers | Samneet Chepal | Overview of Ethereum transactions and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). Overview of Flashbots. Case Study – Rescuing an NFT with Flashbots. Case Study – Exploiting a Smart Contract with Flashbots |
| MEV — A Deep Dive | Medium | Flashbots releases the searchers from participating in the gas war, but we believe application layer innovation providing direct benefits to the users are needed. Private relays can cause centralization issues to the blockchain’s consensus, but it remains one of the most effective ways to eliminate the MEV for users. More innovative implementations on private relays should be further developed to democratize the space. We look forward to seeing more privacy innovations, as well as protocol level roll-ups / sidechains. Or simply, a better order-book based DEXes ecosystem is welcomed! |
| Flashbots Transparency report – | Medium | MEV search activities on Flashbots |
| Automata Network Docs | Docs.ata.network | MEV examples, how to trick bots and different approaches to tackling the MEV problem |
Technical documentation and code repositories
| Reference | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Quick start for searchers using flashbots | Flash Bots | This quick start guide contains all the information necessary to get up and running as a searcher on Flash bots Auction. |
| Flashbots: MEV Auction, Data, Research | Github | Flashbots code repository |
| Dogetoshi | Github | A curated list of projects and resources targeting Miner Extractable Value (MEV) |
| Bert Miller sMEV | Github | This repo contains a searcher developed to take advantage of a 1 off MEV opportunity created by the Synthetix team deprecating their ETH collateral trial program. As a result of this there were many loans that would be liquidatable after the governance proposal was executed. Taking advantage of this required a bot that could backrun the governance proposal execution transaction from the mempool as well as monitoring and execution infrastructure – all of which is contained here. |
Podcasts about MEV
| Name | Source | Description |
|---|---|---|
| What is MEV, its implications and possible solutions | Spotify | In this episode, Crypto___Oracle and I talk with Pmcgoohan, the analyst who first discovered the Miner Extractable Value (MEV) problem in Ethereum pre-genesis in 2014. We define what MEV is, the various types of activity that do and don’t fall under MEV, why MEV Auctions do not solve MEV (Miner Extracted Value aka Maximum Extractible Value), as well as how front-running, back-running, and sachwich attacks on blockchain transactions results in financial harm of end-users. We also cover potential solutions such as Pmcgoohan’s proposed content-layer transaction chunking and Chainlink’s Fair Sequencing Services (FSS), including their complementary nature. |
| Mev Senpai on Uncommon Core | Uncommoncore.co | For our latest episode, I sat down with MEV Senpai, one of the top searchers in Ethereum. He gave us the unique inside perspective of someone who finds and captures MEV himself. |
| MEV.wtf Virtual Summit Summary | HackMD | The evolution of MEV. Framing the problem. Protocol-level response to MEV. Application-level response to MEV. Hybrid model of MEV minimization & democratization |
| Flashbots with Phil Daian and Stephane Gosselin | Zeroknowledge.fm | In this episode, Anna and James Prestwich chat with Phil Daian and Stephane Gosselin from the Flashbots project. Flashbots is a research and development organization formed to mitigate the negative externalities and existential risks posed by miner-extractable value (MEV) to smart-contract blockchains. They talk about the Flashbots organization and mission as well as the evolving opportunities and dangers lurking in the mempool. |
| Blockchain 101: Transaction lifecycle & the mempool | Zeroknowledge.fm | What a mempool/transaction queue/transaction pool is. How a transaction reaches a mempool and what the mempool does with it. Looking at what causes the CPU increase and delays in the network. What happens when a transaction gets stuck. Gossip. The security properties of the mempool. What a network attack could look like. |
| Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm | Zeroknowledge.fm | In this week’s episode, we chat with Dan Robinson, a Research Partner at Paradigm. We talk about the world of crypto VC and revisit of the topic of the Ethereum mempool. We then hear Dan’s story about how he and some colleagues tried to save a transaction from the monsters that lurk in the mempool as told in his blog post entitled “Ethereum is a Dark Forest”. |
| Understanding MEV – with Georgios Konstantopoulos, Dan Robinson, and Hasu | Anchor.fm | Understanding MEV – with Georgios Konstantopoulos, Dan Robinson, and Hasu |
| Flashbots – The Good, Bad and the Ugly of MEV | Epicenter.tv | Co-founders of Flashbots, Stephane Gosselin and Phil Daian, recently joined us to chat about the protocol and to deep dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of MEV. They discuss; Stephane and Phil’s backgrounds and how they got into crypto, What led them to creating Flashbots and what it does, What is Miner/Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), A technical deep dive into how the project works with miners and searchers, The progress on the SGX solution, Spam attacks and reorgs on Flashbots, Phil’s reply to the perspective that MEV extraction is theft and much more. |
Videos about MEV
| Name | Source |
|---|---|
| Enter the Dark Forest: the terrifying world of MEV and Flash bots | The Defiant |
| What is MEV (Miner Extractable Value)? | Defi Weekly |
| Using flash bots to mint NFTs on ETH | Scott Bigelo |
| Flashbots YouTube Channel | Flashbots |
| Interview with a Searcher – with MEV Senpai and Hasu | Uncommon Core |
| Detecting transaction replacement attacks with Manticore | Trail of bits |
| MEV Scaling Ethereum Panel’ – Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, Phil Daian & others | ETHGlobal |
Social media focused on MEV
| Name | Media |
|---|---|
| Flashbots Discord | Discord – The flash bots discord is one of the best places to learn MEV trading |
| MEV Twitter List | |
| Mevintern | |
| Bert Miller’s MEV thread of threads | |
| Hasu on MEV impact on gas prices | |
Tutorials on Searcher strategies used to extract MEV
- Use Python to monitor Twitter accounts for crypto tweets
- Can you make money creating an arbitrage bot running on the Ethereum blockchain?
- Build a snipe bot to monitor and trade liquidity pairs
- Reddit sentiment indicator for crypto in Python
- Flash loan arbitrage on Uniswap and SushiSwap
- Build a crypto back running trading bot
- Compound Finance liquidation bot
- dYdX Liquidation bot
- How to search for MEV opportunities
- How to use Flashbots
- How to query the Ethereum mempool / txpool with Python
Resources
Blockchain Networks
Below is a list of EVM compatible Mainnet and Testnet blockchain networks. Each link contains network configuration, links to multiple faucets for test ETH and tokens, bridge details, and technical resources for each blockchain. Basically everything you need to test and deploy smart contracts or decentralized applications on each chain. For a list of popular Ethereum forums and chat applications click here.
 | Ethereum test network configuration and test ETH faucet information |
 | Optimistic Ethereum Mainnet and Testnet configuration, bridge details, etc. |
 | Polygon network Mainnet and Testnet configuration, faucets for test MATIC tokens, bridge details, etc. |
 | Binance Smart Chain Mainnet and Testnet configuration, faucets for test BNB tokens, bridge details, etc. |
 | Fanton networt Mainnet and Testnet configuration, faucets for test FTM tokens, bridge details, etc. |
 | Kucoin Chain Mainnet and Testnet configuration, faucets for test KCS tokens, bridge details, etc. |
Web3 Software Libraries
You can use the following libraries to interact with an EVM compatible blockchain.
- Python: Web3.py Python library for interacting with Ethereum. Web3.py examples
- Js: web3.js Ethereum JavaScript API
- Java: web3j Web3 Java Ethereum Ðapp API
- PHP: web3.php A php interface for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain and ecosystem.
Nodes
Learn how to run a Geth node. Read getting started with Geth to run an Ethereum node.
Fix a transaction
How to fix a pending transaction stuck on Ethereum or EVM compatible chain
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