On the Redistribution of Maximal Extractable Value: A Dynamic Mechanism

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has emerged as a new frontier in the design of blockchain systems. The marriage between decentralization and finance gives the power to block producers (a.k.a., miners) not only to select and add transactions to the blockchain but, crucially, also to order them so as to extract as much financial gain as possible for themselves. Whilst this price may be unavoidable for the service provided by block producers, users of the chain may in the long run prefer to use less predatory systems. In this paper, we propose to make the MEV extraction rate part of the protocol design space. Our aim is to leverage this parameter to maintain a healthy balance between miners (who need to be compensated) and users (who need to feel encouraged to transact). Inspired by the principles introduced by EIP-1559 for transaction fees, we design a dynamic mechanism which updates the MEV extraction rate with the goal of stabilizing it at a target value. We analyse the evolution of this dynamic mechanism under various market conditions and provide formal guarantees about its long-term performance. Our results show that even when the system behavior is provably chaotic, the dynamics guarantee long-term liveness (survival) and robustness of the system. The main takeaway from our work is that the proposed system exhibits desirable behavior (near-optimal performance) even when it operates in out of equilibrium conditions that are often met in practice. Our work establishes, the first to our knowledge, dynamic framework for the integral problem of MEV sharing between extractors and users.