How MEV Infrastructure Affects Ethereum UX

Users face a lose-lose choice: overpay for a high gas bid or risk a transaction that gets stuck or reverted by competing searchers. This creates a ~30% failure rate for standard swaps during peak congestion, wasting time and funds.\n- Hidden Cost: Failed txs still cost gas, burning user funds.\n- Time Sink: Manual gas estimation and resubmission destroy UX.

Users submit a desired outcome (e.g., 'swap X for Y at best rate') instead of a rigid transaction. Searchers compete to fulfill it off-chain, bearing the gas risk. This abstracts away gas volatility and MEV complexity.\n- Guaranteed Execution: User pays only for a successful result.\n- Better Pricing: Solvers aggregate liquidity across Uniswap, Curve, Balancer for optimal routing.

Searchers exploit public mempool visibility to frontrun user trades, stealing value through slippage. This directly degrades the execution price a user receives, acting as a hidden tax on every swap. The threat forces users to set wider slippage tolerances, increasing vulnerability.\n- Value Extraction: ~$1B+ extracted from users since 2020.\n- Defensive Overpay: Users must accept worse prices to avoid being sandwiched.

Transactions are sent directly to builders/searchers via private channels, bypassing the public mempool. This removes the frontrunning surface. Flashbots Protect and RPC providers like bloXroute now bundle this as a default service.\n- Attack Surface Eliminated: No public visibility, no sandwich.\n- Direct Integration: Becomes a seamless RPC endpoint for wallets like MetaMask.

The MEV supply chain extends across Layer 2s, rollups, and alternative L1s. Arbitrage between Uniswap on Arbitrum and Curve on Mainnet creates complex, multi-step MEV that can delay bridge finality and increase costs for all bridge users. This fragments liquidity and trust.\n- Finality Delays: Bridges wait for arbitrage to settle.\n- Cost Spillover: Searcher gas wars on L1 inflate costs for unrelated users.

A shared sequencer (e.g., for a rollup stack) or intent-based bridge (Across) can internalize cross-domain arbitrage, guaranteeing optimal execution and instant liquidity. This turns a UX pain point into a seamless guarantee. LayerZero's OFT standard enables native asset transfers that bypass traditional bridge delays.\n- Atomic Execution: Cross-chain swap happens in one logical step.\n- Unified Liquidity Pool: No more fragmented capital across chains.

Every public mempool transaction is a free option for searchers. Users pay for failed trades and inflated slippage, with costs often hidden in worse execution prices.

• ~$1.3B+ in MEV extracted from users in 2023 alone.
• Failed transactions still cost gas, a direct wealth transfer to block builders.
• Creates a perverse incentive for validator centralization around the most profitable blocks.

Shifting from transactional (do X) to declarative (I want Y) execution. Protocols like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across aggregate user intent, allowing off-chain solvers to compete for best execution, bypassing public mempool.

• Returns extracted value as better prices (surplus) to the user.
• Eliminates front-running and sandwich attacks by design.
• Centralizes solver competition instead of block builder monopolies.

PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) created a builder market dominated by a few entities like Flashbots and beaverbuild. Their compliance with OFAC sanctions creates censorship risks and centralizes block production.

• Top 3 builders control ~80%+ of Ethereum blocks.
• >50% of blocks are OFAC-compliant, excluding Tornado Cash transactions.
• Threatens Ethereum's credible neutrality and liveness guarantees.

Flashbots' SUAVE aims to decentralize the builder layer itself. It's a shared mempool and decentralized block-building network that separates preference from execution.

• Breaks the monopoly on order flow by creating a competitive, permissionless builder market.
• Preserves privacy through encrypted mempools until execution.
• Aligns incentives by allowing any searcher to become a builder.

Maximal Extractable Value is a latency game. This favors large, centralized players with colocated servers next to major pools, creating a barrier to entry for smaller validators.

• Leads to geographic centralization around AWS/us-east-1 data centers.
• ~12-second block times incentivize <100ms latency requirements for competitive bidding.
• Reinforces the dominance of relay-builder cartels.

Mitigating the reward variance from MEV to reduce the advantage of low-latency players. Ethereum's PBS and potential in-protocol proposer payments can flatten rewards.

• Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) is the first step, isolating the latency-sensitive role.
• Future in-protocol PBS (ePBS) could enforce fairer, more predictable rewards.
• Reduces the risk premium for solo stakers, combating centralization.

Users see failed transactions and slippage as random bad luck. In reality, it's a predictable outcome of public mempool exposure. This destroys trust and increases churn.

• Key Benefit 1: Private transaction channels (via Flashbots Protect, RPCs like Alchemy's) reduce failure rates by >90%.
• Key Benefit 2: Predictable execution enables better slippage estimates and confirmation guarantees.

Shift from submitting rigid transactions to declaring desired outcomes. Let specialized solvers (like CoW Protocol, Across) compete to fulfill the intent optimally.

• Key Benefit 1: Users get better prices via endogenous liquidity and cross-chain MEV capture.
• Key Benefit 2: Gasless UX: Users sign messages, solvers pay gas and handle complexity, abstracting away wallet ETH requirements.

Your default RPC endpoint is a critical UX parameter. Modern providers (Blocknative, BloxRoute) bundle transaction routing, privacy, and block-building access.

• Key Benefit 1: Direct Builder Integration bypasses public mempools, reducing latency to ~500ms and guaranteeing inclusion.
• Key Benefit 2: Fee Optimization dynamically routes to the most efficient block builder (e.g., beaverbuild, Titan) or proposer, reducing costs by 10-30%.

Flashbots' SUAVE is a dedicated chain for expressing and executing preferences. It aims to decentralize the block building market and return value to users.

• Key Benefit 1: Cross-Domain MEV: A unified auction for Ethereum, L2s, and alternative L1s, creating a global liquidity layer.
• Key Benefit 2: Composable Privacy: Applications can program custom encryption and conditional logic directly into the transaction lifecycle.