Why Bundler Extractable Value Will Eclipse Miner Extractable Value

BEV extraction is a high-stakes, low-latency game that favors well-capitalized, vertically-integrated players. This creates a feedback loop where dominant bundlers can outbid smaller ones, leading to market consolidation.

• Capital Advantage: Requires significant upfront capital for stake (EigenLayer), liquidity (Across, Across Protocol), and infrastructure.
• Vertical Integration: Winning bundlers often control the entire stack: searchers, solvers, and relayers, mirroring the Flashbots model.
• Result: A few entities could control the ordering of transactions for millions of users and $10B+ in TVL.

Unlike MEV, where miners could be bypassed via out-of-band payments, BEV gives bundlers direct, protocol-sanctioned control over transaction inclusion and ordering. This creates a formalized censorship vector.

• Regulatory Capture: A dominant bundler could be compelled to censor transactions from sanctioned addresses or protocols.
• No Fork Defense: User transactions and intents (UniswapX, CowSwap) are resolved off-chain; censorship cannot be undone by a chain fork.
• Systemic Risk: A single point of failure for transaction flow, undermining the credibly neutral base layer.

BEV turns Layer 2 sequencers and their associated bundlers into powerful economic gatekeepers. Their incentives are misaligned with the underlying L1, creating a new form of maximal extractable value (MEV) cartel.

• Cross-Domain MEV: Bundlers can extract value by arbitraging between L2 states and L1 finality, a game opaque to end-users.
• Protocol Capture: An L2's chosen shared sequencer (Espresso, Astria) or dominant bundler becomes a rent-seeking intermediary.
• Result: User savings from low fees are clawed back via sophisticated BEV extraction, recentralizing value capture.

The rise of intent-based protocols (UniswapX, Anoma, Essential) doesn't eliminate extraction; it professionalizes it. Solvers compete to fulfill user intents, with the winning solution capturing the maximum spread as BEV.

• Opaque Execution: Users submit what they want, not how to do it, ceding all execution strategy and its associated value to solvers.
• Solver Monopolies: The most efficient solver, often backed by the aforementioned vertical integrator, wins consistently, extracting ~90% of the theoretical user surplus.
• Systemic Consequence: BEV becomes the primary business model for core infrastructure, not a side-effect.

Traditional MEV is captured by a small set of miners/validators with exclusive block-building rights. This creates centralization pressure, front-running risks, and value leakage from users and dApps.

• Centralized Capture: Top 3 mining pools historically controlled >50% of hash power.
• Negative Externalities: Sandwich attacks and failed arbitrage tx cost users ~$1B+ annually.
• Builder Exclusion: Application developers have no direct access to the value their transactions create.

PBS, a core design of Ethereum's roadmap, formally separates block building from block proposing. This creates a competitive market for block space, turning MEV into BEV.

• Open Market: Specialized builders (e.g., Flashbots SUAVE, bloXroute) compete to create the most valuable blocks.
• Efficiency Gains: Optimized bundles can reduce gas costs for users by 10-30%.
• Revenue Redistribution: Value flows to builders and, via proposer payments, back to validators/stakers, creating a more sustainable ecosystem.

BEV enables a new architectural paradigm: intent-based transactions. Users specify what they want, not how to do it. Solvers (like those in CowSwap, UniswapX, Across) compete to fulfill intents optimally, capturing BEV as profit.

• User Experience: Gasless, slippage-tolerant transactions.
• Efficiency Frontier: Solvers aggregate liquidity across DEXs, bridges (LayerZero), and private pools.
• Builder-Solver Symbiosis: Solvers create valuable bundles for builders, creating a layered value chain.

The largest BEV capture will come from vertically integrated stacks that control the full flow: user intent -> solver network -> builder infrastructure -> proposer access.

• Key Players: Watch Flashbots (SUAVE), Jito Labs, and major exchanges building validator networks.
• Infrastructure Moats: Real-time data feeds (Blocknative), cross-chain messaging (LayerZero, Wormhole), and fast execution clients are critical.
• Protocol Opportunity: New L1s/L2s designed with PBS and native account abstraction (like EigenLayer) will have a structural BEV advantage.