The Future of Rollups Is a Battle Over MEV Accounting

Sequencers currently capture ~90% of cross-domain MEV as pure profit, a hidden tax on every transaction. This creates:\n- Adversarial UX: Front-running and sandwich attacks.\n- Centralization Pressure: Profit motives consolidate sequencer power.\n- Value Leakage: Billions in user value never returns to the protocol or its community.

Decouple sequencing from execution to create a transparent market for block building. This enables:\n- MEV Redistribution: Redirect profits to a public goods fund or stakers via proposer-builder separation (PBS).\n- Censorship Resistance: Permissionless proposer sets prevent transaction filtering.\n- Interoperability Boost: Shared sequencing layers enable atomic cross-rollup composability.

The future is users expressing desired outcomes (intents) rather than transactions. Networks like SUAVE and solvers from UniswapX and CowSwap will:\n- Eliminate UX Friction: No more gas estimation or failed transactions.\n- Optimize Globally: Solvers compete to fulfill intents across all chains and liquidity venues.\n- Democratize MEV: Value capture shifts from sequencers to a competitive solver marketplace.

Proof-of-Stake security budgets are insufficient. The solution is subsidizing validators with shared sequencer MEV revenue, creating a virtuous cycle:\n- Higher Yields: Staker rewards are augmented by sequencer profits.\n- Stronger Liveness: Economic incentives ensure a robust, decentralized validator set.\n- Protocol-Owned Liquidity: MEV revenue can be directed to protocol treasuries, creating sustainable funding.

The Problem: Centralized sequencers are opaque profit centers.\nThe Solution: A decentralized, auction-based sequencing layer that forces rollups like Arbitrum and OP Stack chains to compete for block space.\n- Key Benefit: Sequencer revenue is shared back to the rollup's treasury or users.\n- Key Benefit: Enables fast, cross-rollup atomic composability via its shared sequencer.

The Problem: Every rollup reinventing sequencing is wasteful and creates MEV silos.\nThe Solution: A neutral, shared sequencer network that provides decentralized ordering as a service for any rollup.\n- Key Benefit: Rollups retain execution sovereignty but outsource the complex, MEV-heavy ordering layer.\n- Key Benefit: Native cross-rollup liquidity without bridging, as transactions are ordered in a shared mempool.

The Problem: MEV extraction is fragmented and inefficient across chains and rollups.\nThe Solution: A decentralized block builder and executor network that becomes the preferred destination for user transactions and searcher bundles.\n- Key Benefit: Decouples transaction flow from execution, creating a competitive market for block building.\n- Key Benefit: Users capture more value via MEV refunds or better execution prices, directly challenging the status quo of UniswapX and CowSwap.

The Problem: Integrated sequencer-builders have no incentive to minimize MEV or share profits.\nThe Solution: Enshrined PBS, where the sequencer's role is reduced to proposing a block header, while a competitive market of builders (Flashbots, bloXroute) competes to construct the most profitable block.\n- Key Benefit: Censorship resistance is enforced at the protocol level.\n- Key Benefit: Transparent auction reveals the true cost of MEV, enabling efficient redistribution.

The Problem: Native PBS protocol upgrades are slow.\nThe Solution: An out-of-protocol marketplace, like Ethereum's MEV-Boost, adapted for rollup environments.\n- Key Benefit: Immediate implementation, allowing rollups like zkSync and Starknet to decentralize sequencing today.\n- Key Benefit: Siphons MEV revenue from centralized sequencer operators to a network of builders and proposers.

The Problem: Billions in arbitrage and liquidation value is trapped between siloed rollups and L1s.\nThe Solution: Specialized cross-domain MEV relays and intent-based architectures (Across, Socket, LayerZero) that coordinate settlement across heterogeneous systems.\n- Key Benefit: Unlocks a new magnitude of extractable value, increasing economic security.\n- Key Benefit: Forces rollups to compete on MEV redistribution policies to attract liquidity.

Unaccounted MEV is a direct, hidden cost that degrades user experience and protocol economics. It's not just about sandwich attacks; it's about the systematic extraction of value that should flow to users or the protocol treasury.

• Result: Up to 50-100 bps of user swap value is lost to searchers.
• Consequence: Creates a toxic UX where users are structurally disadvantaged, harming adoption.

Force a clean market separation between the entity that builds blocks (Builder) and the one that proposes them (Proposer). This is the foundational accounting layer for MEV.

• Key Benefit: Enables transparent MEV auctions, moving extraction from the shadows to a public market.
• Key Benefit: Allows the rollup/sequencer to capture value via auction revenue, which can be used to subsidize transaction costs or fund the treasury.

Move beyond simple transaction execution. Let users express what they want (e.g., "best price for 1 ETH"), not how to do it. Solvers (like those in CowSwap, UniswapX) compete to fulfill intents optimally.

• Key Benefit: User gets guaranteed, MEV-resistant outcomes. The solver absorbs complexity and frontrunning risk.
• Key Benefit: The rollup's PBS auction now includes solver competition, creating a more efficient and value-capturing market layer.

These are horizontal services aiming to become the neutral PBS layer for multiple rollups. They promise cross-rollup MEV capture and atomic composability.

• Key Benefit: Offers smaller rollups a battle-tested MEV accounting and ordering system without bespoke development.
• Key Benefit: Unlocks cross-rollup atomic arbitrage, a new MEV category that a solo rollup cannot access alone.
• Risk: Cedes critical sequencing sovereignty and economic upside to a third-party network.

Next-gen rollups are being designed from the ground up with explicit MEV accounting and PBS as a first-class citizen. This is a full-stack architectural advantage.

• Key Benefit: Native integration allows for more efficient block building, faster proof generation, and optimized fee markets.
• Key Benefit: Tighter integration between execution, settlement, and data availability layers creates a more defensible and high-performance system versus modular "plug-and-play" approaches.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure. The first step for any serious rollup team is to instrument their chain to track MEV flows with the precision of an exchange.

• Track: Searcher profit per block, win-rate of dominant builders, protocol revenue from PBS auctions.
• Benchmark: Compare your MEV leakage and capture rates against benchmarks like Arbitrum after its PBS rollout or Optimism's upcoming auction design.
• Goal: Turn MEV from a cost center into a transparent, manageable, and potentially profitable part of your protocol economics.