Hi everyone,
Mitigating MEV and front-running feels like one of those problems everyone acknowledges, but we still treat as an unavoidable side effect of public blockchains. I’d like to open a deeper discussion around techniques that go beyond simply decentralizing the sequencer or tweaking fee markets.
In particular, I’m interested in approaches like encrypted mempools, threshold encryption, and commit-reveal schemes that aim to hide transaction details until ordering is finalized. There are also newer ideas around fair ordering services and refined proposer/builder separation models that try to align incentives rather than just redistribute extraction opportunities. The question is: can we meaningfully reduce harmful MEV without breaking composability or degrading UX?
For ecosystems building modular or Layer-0 architectures, this feels especially relevant. If execution, settlement, and sequencing are separated, we might have more flexibility to experiment with alternative ordering rules or shared sequencing markets. At the same time, cross-chain composability could amplify MEV vectors if not designed carefully.
I’d be curious to hear whether people think MEV minimization should be handled at the protocol layer, delegated to specialized middleware, or left to application-level design patterns. Are there practical implementations we can learn from, or is most of this still theoretical?