Modular Blockchains Amplify MEV Across Layers

Separate settlement and execution layers create latency arbitrage windows. Searchers race to exploit price differences between rollups (Arbitrum, Optimism) and L1 (Ethereum) faster than the cross-chain bridge finality.

• New Attack Vector: Exploit the ~10-20 minute withdrawal delay from optimistic rollups.
• Amplified Scale: A single L1 block can reference state from dozens of L2 blocks, multiplying opportunities.

With execution offloaded, the settlement layer (e.g., Ethereum, Celestia) becomes a pure competition ground for ordering and censorship. This centralizes economic power.

• Power Concentration: Proposers on the settlement layer capture value from all connected rollups.
• Forced Integration: Rollups must use shared sequencing (e.g., Espresso, Astria) or decentralized sequencers to avoid this tax.

Cheap, external DA layers (Celestia, EigenDA) introduce a new trust assumption: data withholding attacks. Malicious sequencers can censor transactions by not publishing data, preventing fraud proofs.

• Novel Risk: Data withholding becomes a profitable, hard-to-detect MEV strategy.
• Ecosystem Threat: A single DA layer compromise can freeze $10B+ in TVL across multiple rollups.

Projects like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across are moving to intent-based designs where users declare what they want, not how. This shifts MEV competition from the public mempool to solver networks.

• MEV Democratization: Solvers compete on inclusion, not exclusion, potentially returning value to users.
• Modular Native: Intents are perfectly suited for cross-domain execution, abstracting away the complexity of the modular stack.

Sovereign rollups and L2s create isolated liquidity pools. A price delta between Ethereum and Arbitrum is now a new, complex arbitrage vector, requiring coordination across sequencers, bridges, and proposers.

• New Attack Surface: Exploits require manipulating state across multiple trust domains.
• Value Escalation: MEV is no longer confined to a single chain's mempool; it's a network-level game.

Espresso is building a marketplace for rollup sequencers, attempting to commoditize block production. This centralizes cross-domain transaction ordering, creating a powerful new MEV extraction point.

• Centralized Bottleneck: Whoever controls the shared sequencer controls the cross-chain flow.
• Economic Capture: Extracts fees from every connected rollup, aiming for $1B+ annualized revenue at scale.

Jito's MEV-Boost equivalent captured over $1B in extracted value in 2023. This proves that even in a monolithic chain, modularizing block building creates a dominant, rent-extracting entity. The same dynamic will replay across the modular stack.

• Protocol Capture: Core protocol revenue (tips) is diverted to a private entity.
• Validator Centralization: Economic pressure pushes validators to the most profitable builder.

SUAVE is a dedicated chain for preference expression and execution, aiming to democratize MEV. It's a bet that a neutral, modular platform for intents can outcompete private, centralized extractors like Espresso.

• Intents Standardization: Turns opaque arbitrage into a transparent auction (see: UniswapX, CowSwap).
• Execution Network: Decouples transaction creation from chain-specific execution, creating a new liquidity layer.

Searchers now operate across multiple execution layers (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism, Base) and settlement layers (e.g., Ethereum, Celestia). This creates cross-domain arbitrage opportunities but also amplifies latency races and front-running vectors.\n- New Attack Surface: MEV can be extracted in the bridging/settlement process between layers.\n- Amplified Complexity: Requires monitoring and bidding on ~10-20+ chains simultaneously.

With modular DA layers like Celestia and EigenDA, block producers can withhold or reorder transaction data before it's settled. This enables time-bandit attacks where a sequencer can rewrite history based on later-revealed information.\n- Settlement Risk: Fraud proofs or validity proofs are delayed without guaranteed DA.\n- Extraction Shift: Value capture moves upstream from execution to data publishing.

Projects like Astria and Espresso aim to decentralize sequencing, but they create a new, systemically important layer. A shared sequencer becomes a single point of failure and extraction, potentially capturing MEV across all rollups it serves.\n- Concentrated Power: Control over transaction ordering for $1B+ TVL across multiple rollups.\n- Cartel Formation: Risk of sequencer collusion to maximize cross-rollup MEV.

Each new modular execution layer fragments liquidity, creating more, smaller pools for arbitrage. This increases the surface area for DEX arbitrage but also makes large trades more costly due to deeper slippage across chains.\n- Inefficiency Multiplier: Same asset has 5-10 different prices across rollups.\n- Searcher Advantage: Automated systems profit from persistent, structural inefficiencies.

Systems like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across use solver networks to fulfill user intents off-chain. This shifts the MEV competition from public mempools to a solver auction, potentially reducing harmful MEV.\n- User Benefit: Better execution via batch auctions and MEV recapture.\n- New Dynamic: MEV is internalized and competed away by solvers rather than extracted from users.

In a modular stack, light nodes and validators must verify data across multiple layers. The economic cost of verification creates a free-rider problem, where nodes rely on others. This allows malicious sequencers to slip invalid state transitions past a critical mass of unverified assumptions.\n- Security Reliance: Security depends on 1-2 full verifiers being honest.\n- Systemic Risk: A successful fraud on one layer can cascade due to interconnected liquidity.