The Business Model Behind MEV Relays

Builders need block space and transactions, searchers need execution, and users want better prices. Without a coordinator, this market is inefficient and opaque.

• Builder-Searcher Coordination: Manual deal-making is slow and misses opportunities.
• User MEV Leakage: Slippage and frontrunning erode user value.
• Fragmented Liquidity: Cross-domain arbitrage is complex and risky.

Relays act as a centralized clearinghouse, running a real-time auction for the right to include and order transactions in a block.

• Revenue Stream 1: Auction Fees: Taking a cut from winning searcher bids (e.g., ~5-15% of extracted value).
• Revenue Stream 2: Priority Gas Auctions: Monetizing the right to be the first transaction in a block.
• Revenue Stream 3: Cross-Chain Bundling: Aggregating arbitrage across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism for a single, profitable bundle.

A relay's business is defended by operational excellence, not just software. The winners are infrastructure giants.

• Data Advantage: Proprietary mempool feeds and searcher relationship graphs inform pricing.
• Sub-Second Latency: Network topology near validators is a hard cap-ex barrier.
• Credible Neutrality: Relays like BloXroute and Flashbots must be trusted not to censor or frontrun their own auctions.

The logical evolution is absorbing the solver role from UniswapX and CowSwap. Users submit intents, relays auction fulfillment to the best solver network.

• Vertical Integration: Capturing value from user intent to final settlement.
• Cross-Chain Primitive: Becoming the default routing layer for LayerZero and Axelar messages.
• Commoditizing Builders: Builders become execution arms, while relays control the profitable order flow.

The dominant MEV-Boost relay market share creates a systemic risk. If Flashbots' relay censors or fails, ~90% of Ethereum blocks are impacted. This centralization is the antithesis of credibly neutral infrastructure.

• Market Share: Controls >80% of relayed blocks.
• Regulatory Vector: A single US-based entity is a clear target for OFAC sanctions enforcement.
• Architectural Risk: SUAVE's promise of decentralization remains unproven at scale.

Relays like BloXroute and Manifold enforce OFAC sanctions by filtering transactions, making censorship the profitable, low-risk default. This turns decentralized finance into a permissioned system via economic pressure.

• Compliance Pressure: ~70% of post-Merge blocks are OFAC-compliant.
• Business Incentive: Avoiding regulatory risk is more profitable than maximizing builder revenue.
• Slippery Slope: Transaction filtering is a gateway to more granular financial surveillance.

Relays and builders extract value from the public mempool without returning it to users or validators. This is a multi-billion dollar annual business built on a commons, creating misaligned incentives that resist decentralization.

• Revenue Scale: $500M+ in annual extracted MEV flowing through relays.
• Validator Cut: Typical builder payments are a ~5-10% cut of the MEV, a tax for access.
• Innovation Stifling: High relay margins disincentivize the R&D needed for peer-to-peer solutions like mev-commit or shutterized rollups.

Relays have a privileged, centralized view of the entire transaction intention graph. This data is more valuable than the execution fees, creating a surveillance business model that threatens user privacy and enables frontrunning.

• Data Asset: Real-time access to 100% of order flow for connected builders.
• Privacy Threat: Techniques like SGX are trusted hardware black boxes, not cryptographic guarantees.
• Competitive Moat: This data monopoly is the primary barrier to entry for new decentralized relays.

Validators maximize profit by selling block space to the highest bidder in private, off-chain deals. This creates an information asymmetry where users and builders are at a disadvantage.

• Centralization Risk: Top relays like Flashbots Protect and BloXroute dominate, creating gatekeepers.
• Extracted Value: Billions in MEV flow through these channels, with relay fees and side-deals being opaque.
• Censorship Surface: Relays can choose which transactions to include, becoming political actors.

Protocols like EigenLayer and SUAVE aim to dismantle the relay oligopoly by commoditizing its components: trust, ordering, and execution.

• Decentralized Trust: EigenLayer's restaking allows for cryptoeconomically secured block building networks.
• Neutral Mempool: SUAVE envisions a shared, preference-free environment for transaction processing.
• Builder-Boost: This shifts power from a few relay operators to a competitive marketplace of builders.

A relay's core product is credible neutrality. Their revenue is a tax on the certainty of fair inclusion and protection from harmful MEV.

• Fee-for-Service: Relays charge builders a percentage of the bid or a flat fee for order flow.
• Data Monetization: The view into transaction flow is a valuable proprietary data feed.
• Staking Derivatives: Control of block production enables lucrative restaking and DeFi integrations.

The ultimate disintermediation of relays comes from intent-based architectures, as pioneered by UniswapX and CowSwap. Users declare what they want, not how to do it.

• Solver Competition: Networks of solvers compete to fulfill user intents optimally, bypassing traditional block building.
• Cross-Chain Native: Protocols like Across and LayerZero integrate intents for seamless cross-chain value transfer.
• Relay Obsolescence: The need for a centralized, trusted ordering party is minimized.