SoK: The Evolution of Maximal Extractable Value, From Miners to Cross-Chain

This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper provides a comprehensive historical analysis of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) by organizing fragmented literature into three chronological eras—from Miner Extractable Value in Proof-of-Work systems to the modern cross-chain frontier—while offering a unified taxonomy, identifying mitigations, and proposing a research agenda for standardized metrics and cross-chain infrastructure.

The Gist

Imagine the blockchain as a giant, public digital auction house where people buy and sell digital assets. In this house, there's a special group of people called "Block Producers" (formerly miners, now validators) who get to decide the order in which transactions happen.

This paper, written by Davide Mancino and Hasret Ozan Sevim, is a history book about how a group of clever traders figured out how to make massive profits by manipulating that order. They call this profit MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).

The authors break this history down into three distinct eras, like seasons in a TV show, showing how the game evolved from a simple trick to a high-tech, multi-city heist.

🎬 The Three Eras of MEV

Era 1: The "Miner" Era (2014–2020)

• The Setting: A single, open town square (the public blockchain). Everyone can see everyone else's shopping list (the "mempool").
• The Trick: Imagine you see a neighbor about to buy a rare painting for $100. You know the price will instantly jump to $150 after they buy it.
  • The Move: You jump in line before them, buy the painting for $100, and then sell it to them for $140. You made $40 profit, and they paid $40 more than they needed to.
  • The Name: Back then, only the "Miners" (the people running the auction house) could do this easily. So, it was called Miner Extractable Value.
• The Problem: It was chaotic. Bots fought each other by bidding higher and higher fees to get to the front of the line, clogging the system and making it expensive for regular people.
• The "Dark Forest": In 2020, an article called "Ethereum is a Dark Forest" went viral. It compared the blockchain to a dark forest where if you make a sound (submit a transaction), a predator (a bot) will instantly hear you and eat you (steal your profit).

Era 2: The "Maximal" & Industrial Era (2020–2024)

• The Shift: The rules changed. The "Miners" were replaced by "Validators," and the system got more complex. The term changed from "Miner" to Maximal Extractable Value because anyone with the power to order transactions could do it, not just miners.
• The Industrialization: This wasn't just a few guys in a garage anymore. It became a massive industry with a supply chain:
  1. Searchers: The bots looking for profit.
  2. Builders: The factories that assemble the transactions.
  3. Relays: The middlemen who pass the packages.
  4. Proposers: The auction house managers.
• The New Tricks:
  • Private Channels: Instead of shouting in the public square, traders started whispering directly to the auction house managers via private tunnels (Flashbots). This stopped the public chaos but made the system more secretive.
  • Cross-Venue Arbitrage: Traders started playing games between the "Public Market" (Decentralized Exchanges) and the "Private Market" (Centralized Exchanges like Coinbase), buying low in one and selling high in the other instantly.

Era 3: The "Cross-Chain" Era (2024–Present)

• The New Frontier: The blockchain world exploded. Now there isn't just one town square; there are many different cities (Layer 1, Layer 2, different blockchains) connected by bridges.
• The Ultimate Heist: The paper describes how traders now coordinate attacks across these different cities.
  • The Analogy: Imagine a thief who sees a price difference between a store in New York and a store in London. In the old days, they could only shop in one city. Now, they can buy in New York, instantly teleport the item to London via a bridge, and sell it there, all in one seamless move.
• The "Speculative" Spam: Because the new "cities" (Layer 2s) don't have a public shopping list, bots can't see what others are buying. So, they start spamming the system. They submit thousands of "what-if" transactions every second, hoping one of them hits a profit. If it fails, it's just digital trash, but if it works, they get rich. This clogs the network with "spam."
• The "Sandwich" Across Cities: A new type of attack was discovered where a bot watches a transaction being sent from City A to City B. It attacks the transaction while it's traveling across the bridge, sandwiching the victim between two of its own trades.

🛡️ The Defense Game (Mitigations)

The paper also looks at how the system is trying to fight back:

• Commit-Reveal: Like putting your bid in a sealed envelope so no one can see it until the auction is over.
• Encrypted Mempools: Hiding the shopping list so predators can't see what you're buying until it's too late for them to copy you.
• Shared Sequencers: Trying to build a single "traffic cop" that manages the order for all the different cities at once, so no one can cheat across the bridges.

🧠 The Big Takeaway

The authors conclude that MEV is no longer just a bug; it's a feature of the system that has evolved into a massive, complex economy.

• Then: It was a simple game of "who can pay the most to get to the front of the line."
• Now: It is a high-stakes, multi-city, cross-border game of chess involving billions of dollars, where the "players" are sophisticated AI bots, and the "board" spans multiple blockchains.

The paper warns that as we build more bridges between these digital worlds, the opportunities for these "predators" to steal value will grow, and we need better rules, better tools to measure the theft, and better defenses to protect the regular users.

Technical Summary

Here is a detailed technical summary of the Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) paper, "The Evolution of Maximal Extractable Value, From Miners to Cross-Chain."

1. Problem Statement

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has evolved from a niche concern regarding miner behavior in Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains into a multi-billion dollar industry affecting the security, fairness, and economic stability of the entire blockchain ecosystem. The literature on MEV is currently fragmented across cryptography, distributed systems, and financial economics, with inconsistent terminology and a lack of unified frameworks.

The core problem addressed is the need to:

• Consolidate scattered studies into a unified chronological and conceptual taxonomy.
• Trace the causal evolution of MEV from single-chain, miner-centric extraction to complex, cross-domain (cross-chain) strategies.
• Identify the gaps in current measurement methodologies, particularly regarding cross-chain arbitrage and the distinction between potential and realized value.
• Outline a research agenda for standardized metrics, detection benchmarks, and mitigation designs in an increasingly multi-chain environment.

2. Methodology

The authors employ a Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) approach, organizing the literature not by topic, but through a two-dimensional framework:

1. Temporal Axis (Three Eras): The paper divides the history of MEV (2014–Present) into three distinct eras based on conceptual shifts and infrastructure changes.
2. Conceptual Axis: The paper distinguishes between:
   • Potential vs. Realized MEV: The theoretical maximum extractable value vs. the value actually captured in practice.
   • Single-Domain vs. Cross-Domain MEV: Extraction confined to one blockchain vs. extraction requiring coordination across multiple chains (L1, L2, CEX, bridges).

The authors synthesize academic publications, industry reports, and technical documentation, focusing primarily on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains while incorporating work on other architectures (e.g., Algorand, Polygon, Rollups).

3. Key Contributions

A. Historical Framework: The Three Eras

The paper structures the evolution of MEV into three specific eras:

• Era I: Miner Extractable Value (Aug 2014 – Aug 2020)

  • Context: Proof-of-Work (PoW) Ethereum with public mempools.
  • Key Events: pmcgoohan's 2014 Reddit warning, the "Dark Forest" article (2020).
  • Focus: Miners reordering transactions in public mempools. Strategies included Priority Gas Auctions (PGAs), front-running, and sandwich attacks.
  • Threat: Consensus instability (Time-bandit attacks where miners reorganize the chain to capture historical MEV).

• Era II: Maximal Extractable Value (Aug 2020 – Apr 2024)

  • Context: Transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), industrialization of extraction, and Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS).
  • Key Events: Flashbots launch, The Merge, MEV-Boost, Dencun upgrade.
  • Shift: Renaming from "Miner" to "Maximal" to reflect that any ordering entity (validators, sequencers) can extract value.
  • Innovation: Introduction of Realized Extractable Value (REV) to measure actual profits. Emergence of private order flow, Order Flow Auctions (OFAs), and non-atomic CEX-DEX arbitrage.

• Era III: Cross-Chain MEV (Apr 2024 – Present)

  • Context: Multi-chain ecosystems, Layer-2 (L2) rollups, and bridges.
  • Key Events: Torres et al.'s "Rolling in the Shadows" (L2 analysis), Oz et al.'s cross-chain arbitrage study.
  • Focus: Value extraction requiring coordination across heterogeneous domains (different consensus mechanisms, latency, and trust assumptions).
  • New Phenomena: Speculative/Optimistic MEV (bots submitting speculative transactions on L2s due to lack of public mempools) and Cross-Layer Sandwich Attacks (exploiting L1-to-L2 bridge latency).

B. Conceptual Taxonomy

The paper proposes a unified terminology distinguishing:

• Domains: Any system with a sequencer (L1, L2, CEX, Bridge).
• Sequencers: The entity controlling transaction ordering (Miner, Validator, Sequencer Operator).
• Primitives:
  • Front-running: Inserting a transaction before a victim.
  • Back-running: Inserting a transaction after a victim.
  • Sandwich: Combining both.
• Atomicity:
  • Atomic: Executed in a single transaction/block.
  • Non-Atomic: Spanning multiple transactions, blocks, or chains (e.g., CEX-DEX arbitrage, Cross-chain arbitrage).

C. Empirical Findings & Measurements

• Scale: MEV has grown from ~$6M (Era I) to hundreds of millions. Wu et al. documented $233.8M from CEX-DEX arbitrage alone (2023–2025). Oz et al. identified 242,535 cross-chain arbitrages generating $8.65M net profit.
• Concentration: In Era II, two builders produced >85% of Ethereum blocks. In Era III, five addresses executed >50% of cross-chain trades.
• L2 Dynamics: L2s exhibit high "speculative spam" (reverted transactions) because searchers cannot observe public mempools and must poll on-chain.
• Cross-Chain Complexity: Multi-hop (3+ chain) arbitrage is extremely rare and costly due to latency; most cross-chain MEV is 2-hop (SIA/SDA).

D. Mitigation Landscape

The paper categorizes defenses by era:

• Era I: Commit-reveal schemes (limited adoption due to UX/latency).
• Era II: Encrypted mempools, Fair ordering protocols, PBS (shifts centralization to builders), and Order Flow Auctions.
• Era III: Shared sequencers (atomic cross-rollup execution), Intent-based protocols, and ZK-based bridges.
• Trade-offs: The paper notes that no mitigation is perfect; solutions often trade off latency, decentralization, or introduce new centralization vectors (e.g., builder concentration).

4. Results

• Evolution of Threat: The threat has shifted from simple front-running in a public mempool to complex, coordinated attacks spanning multiple chains and trust boundaries.
• Measurement Gap: Current metrics are inconsistent. The distinction between Potential (theoretical) and Realized (actual) MEV is critical but often blurred in literature.
• Cross-Chain Reality: Cross-domain MEV is not just "more" MEV; it introduces new attack vectors like Cross-Layer Sandwiching (exploiting bridge latency) and Optimistic MEV (high-volume speculative polling on L2s).
• Centralization Risk: The industrialization of MEV (PBS, shared sequencers) has led to significant concentration of power among a few builders and sequencer operators, posing risks to network decentralization.

5. Significance and Research Agenda

This SoK is significant because it provides the first comprehensive, chronological framework for understanding MEV, bridging the gap between academic theory and industry practice. It highlights that the unit of analysis is no longer a single blockchain but a multi-domain ecosystem.

Proposed Research Agenda:

1. Standardized Metrics: Establish community-agreed benchmarks for measuring Potential vs. Realized MEV across single and cross-domains.
2. Cross-Domain Detection: Develop formal frameworks (e.g., graph-based or ML) to detect complex cross-chain strategies, as current heuristics miss many opportunities.
3. Sequencer Incentives: Analyze game-theoretic models for sequencer competition and collusion in multi-chain environments.
4. Welfare Analysis: Rigorously distinguish between value-creating MEV (e.g., arbitrage improving price efficiency) and value-destroying MEV (e.g., spam, manipulation).
5. Bridge Security: Investigate the interaction between bridge vulnerabilities and MEV incentives.
6. Regulation: Address regulatory implications of cross-chain MEV, particularly regarding market manipulation and user intent across jurisdictions.

In conclusion, the paper argues that as blockchain ecosystems grow in complexity, managing extractable value is central to achieving the goals of decentralization, fairness, and security. The transition to cross-chain MEV represents a new frontier where infrastructure design must evolve to handle asynchronous, multi-domain coordination.