The Future of Blockspace: A Commodity Shaped by MEV

Public mempools are a free-for-all, leaking user intent and subsidizing sophisticated searchers with $1B+ in annual extracted value. This creates a toxic UX of front-running and failed transactions, forcing protocols to build defensively.

Networks like Flashbots Protect and BloXroute privatize transactions, routing intent directly to builders. This shifts the power dynamic from public auctions to negotiated, off-chain markets, capturing value for users and validators.

• Key Benefit: User protection from front-running
• Key Benefit: Predictable, reduced execution costs

PBS, Ethereum's core post-merge upgrade, formally separates block building from proposing. This creates a competitive builder market for MEV, preventing validator centralization and enabling complex, optimized block construction.

• Key Benefit: Censorship resistance
• Key Benefit: Specialized builder ecosystems

The future is declarative: users state what they want (e.g., "swap X for Y at best price"), not how to do it. UniswapX and CoW Swap pioneer this. SUAVE aims to be a universal, decentralized mempool and executor for this intent-based economy.

As execution complexity moves off-chain to builders and intents platforms, base layers like Ethereum and Solana increasingly specialize as high-security settlement and data availability layers. Their value accrual shifts from simple gas to premium blockspace auctions.

Raw transactions per second (TPS) is a vanity metric. The real bottleneck for cross-chain DeFi and unified liquidity is time-to-finality. Networks optimizing for fast, certain settlement (e.g., Solana, Monad) will capture the next wave of composable applications.

Retail users blindly sign transactions, leaking alpha to public mempools. This creates a negative-sum game where value is extracted from the edges of the network.

• ~$1B+ in MEV extracted annually from Ethereum alone.
• Front-running and sandwich attacks degrade user experience and trust.
• Creates an adversarial relationship between users and builders.

Shift from transaction-based to outcome-based interactions. Users express what they want, not how to do it, and route via private channels.

• UniswapX and CowSwap are pioneering intent-based architectures.
• Flashbots Protect RPC and bloxroute privatize order flow.
• Enables batch auctions and coincidence of wants for better pricing.

Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) is incomplete. Builders compete on a single dimension (bid size), ignoring long-term value and network health.

• Leads to centralization pressure on the builder market.
• Ignores externalities like chain congestion and state growth.
• MEV-Boost is a temporary, centralized crutch, not a final design.

Bake PBS into the protocol consensus layer. Introduce multi-dimensional auctions where proposers can score builders on criteria beyond just payment.

• Ethereum's ePBS roadmap aims to enshrine and decentralize the role.
• MEV smoothing mechanisms like MEV-Share or MEV burn can redistribute value.
• Creates a more stable, credibly neutral fee market for blockspace.

Arbitrage and liquidation opportunities exist across chains, but execution is fragmented and risky. Bridges like LayerZero and Axelar create new attack surfaces for cross-domain MEV.

• $200M+ lost to bridge exploits, many MEV-adjacent.
• Latency and settlement finality differences create complex atomicity problems.
• No unified security or ordering model for cross-chain intent.

A shared sequencing layer provides a global ordering of events across rollups, enabling secure cross-domain MEV capture. This turns a vulnerability into a feature.

• Espresso Systems, Astria, and Radius are building shared sequencers.
• Enables atomic arbitrage bundles across L2s.
• Creates a unified blockspace commodity market for all connected chains.