SoK: MEV Countermeasures
Blockchains offer strong security guarantees, but they cannot protect the ordering of transactions. Powerful players, such as miners, sequencers, and sophisticated bots, can reap significant profits by selectively including, excluding, or reordering user transactions. Such profits are called Miner/Maximal Extractable Value or MEV. MEV bears profound implications for blockchain security and decentralization. While numerous countermeasures have been proposed to mitigate the negative effects of MEV, there is no agreement on the best solution. Moreover, solutions developed in academic literature differ quite drastically from what is widely adopted by practitioners. For these reasons, this paper systematizes the knowledge of existing MEV countermeasures. The contribution is twofold. First, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of 32 proposed MEV countermeasures, covering four different technical directions. Second, we summarize four security problems caused by MEV and examine whether different MEV countermeasures can effectively address these problems. Our work also helps identify directions for future research on MEV and MEV mitigation.
