Storage MEV (Miner/Maximal Extractable Value)

Exploiting the difference between a transaction's actual gas cost and the gas price paid by the user. This includes:

• Gas Token Minting/Burning: Minting gas tokens (e.g., CHI, GST2) when gas prices are low and burning them to refund gas when prices are high, effectively paying lower net fees.
• Gas Price Oracle Manipulation: Front-running transactions that rely on a gas price oracle, causing them to overpay for gas.

Optimizing transaction ordering or content to minimize the cost of accessing and modifying storage slots, a core cost on EVM chains.

• Slot Wrapping: Batching multiple user operations that access the same storage slot into a single transaction to amortize the high initial SLOAD or SSTORE cost across them.
• Warm/Cold Slot Exploitation: Ensuring a storage slot is 'warm' (already accessed in the block) before a profitable operation to reduce its gas cost, often via a preparatory transaction.

Profiting from the mechanics of on-chain liquidation engines in lending protocols like Aave or Compound.

• Liquidation Ordering: Securing the right to liquidate the most profitable positions first within a block by paying a higher priority fee.
• Collateral Basket Manipulation: Triggering a price update that renders a position undercollateralized, then being the first to liquidate it, often combined with flash loans.

A classic MEV strategy that inherently involves storage state. While profit comes from price differences, execution depends on storage.

• Sandwich Attacks: Front-running a large user swap and back-running it with a counter-swap, profiting from the price impact. This requires precise control over transaction ordering and state changes within a block.
• Multi-Pool Arbitrage: Executing a complex, multi-step swap across different DEX liquidity pools within a single transaction (a bundle) to capture price discrepancies, atomically changing multiple storage states.

Influencing the on-chain price reported by an oracle to trigger favorable conditions.

• Oracle Latency Exploitation: Submitting a transaction that will be included just after a price update from a decentralized oracle (e.g., Chainlink), knowing the new price will enable a profitable trade or liquidation.
• TWAP Manipulation: Attempting to influence a Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP) oracle by executing large trades at the beginning or end of an averaging period to skew the result.

Extracting value from the storage and logic of NFT marketplaces.

• Floor Price Sniping: Using a bot to instantly purchase an NFT listed significantly below the current market floor price before other users can react.
• Bidding Games: On marketplaces with English auctions, placing a bid at the last possible moment (sniping) to win at a lower price, or manipulating the auction's end time logic.

Storage MEV is primarily extracted through data availability (DA) auctions or fee markets. Actors who control block production (e.g., sequencers on rollups) can prioritize which data blobs or calldata are included and in what order. This creates opportunities for:

• Frontrunning storage commitments for high-value NFT mint data.
• Censoring competing transactions to delay their data publication.
• Time-bandit attacks reordering blocks to capture value from state changes dependent on data finality.

This MEV surface is most prominent in modular blockchain architectures where data publication is a distinct, costly layer.

• Optimistic & ZK Rollups: Sequencers profit by managing the L2 transaction sequence and the subsequent L1 data posting, potentially delaying or reordering data to extract value.
• Celestia, EigenDA, Avail: Dedicated DA layers have their own block builders and proposers who can extract MEV from the ordering of data blobs.
• Ethereum with EIP-4844 (Blobs): Proposers can influence the inclusion of blobs, creating a new MEV market around blobspace.

Specialized searchers and builders employ bots to detect and capture Storage MEV opportunities.

• Blob Arbitrage: Profiting from price differences between the cost to post data on-chain and off-chain data service fees.
• Cross-layer MEV: Manipulating the timing of data publication to create profitable arbitrage between an L2 and L1, or between two L2s sharing a DA layer.
• Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS): Builders construct data-dense blocks to win auctions, potentially embedding their own value-extracting transactions.

Storage MEV has significant implications for network security and application guarantees.

• Increased Centralization: High MEV rewards can incentivize validator/sequencer centralization.
• Data Finality Latency: Extraction strategies that delay data posting undermine low-latency guarantees for rollups.
• Censorship Resistance: The ability to censor data blobs for profit challenges network neutrality.
• Cost Volatility: MEV-driven bidding wars can make data posting costs unpredictable for applications.

The ecosystem is developing mechanisms to mitigate harmful Storage MEV.

• Encrypted Mempools: Hiding transaction content (e.g., via threshold encryption) until inclusion to prevent frontrunning.
• Commit-Reveal Schemes: Submitting data commitments first, then revealing content later, separating inclusion from ordering value.
• Fair Ordering Protocols: Cryptographic protocols that enforce a fair transaction order based on receipt time.
• Sufficient Decentralization: A robust, decentralized set of sequencers or proposers reduces the profit from centralized reordering.

Understanding Storage MEV requires familiarity with adjacent concepts.

• Data Availability (DA): The guarantee that data is published and accessible for download.
• Miner Extractable Value (MEV): The broader category of value extraction from block production.
• Sequencer: The entity that orders transactions on a rollup before posting data to L1.
• Blob Transactions: Ethereum's EIP-4844 transaction type for cheap, ephemeral data.
• Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS): A design separating block building from proposal to mitigate MEV centralization.

Storage MEV (Miner/Maximal Extractable Value) is the profit that can be extracted by strategically controlling the order and inclusion of data availability (DA) submissions, such as rollup batches or large data blobs, on a base layer. Unlike traditional MEV focused on transaction ordering within a block, Storage MEV exploits the timing and placement of data to influence the state or execution of Layer 2 systems.

• Key Actors: Sequencers, validators, or specialized proposers who can influence data inclusion.
• Extraction Vector: Profit arises from front-running, censoring, or delaying critical data to manipulate L2 state for arbitrage or other gains.

Storage MEV introduces systemic risks that can compromise the liveness and security guarantees of rollups.

• Censorship Attacks: A malicious proposer can censor a rollup's data batch, preventing state updates and effectively halting the L2 chain.
• Liveness Faults: Delaying the inclusion of critical data (like fraud or validity proofs) can extend challenge windows, creating uncertainty and enabling other attacks.
• Cross-Layer Manipulation: Adversarial ordering of DA can create arbitrage opportunities between L1 and L2 DEXs or oracle price feeds.

The economics of Storage MEV create a tension between profit-seeking and network health.

• Proposer/Validator Incentive: The potential for MEV revenue can encourage proposer decentralization as entities compete for the right to order data. However, it can also lead to centralization if extraction becomes highly specialized.
• Rollup Cost Trade-off: Rollups opting for higher-cost, guaranteed data availability (e.g., on Ethereum) purchase censorship resistance. Those using lower-cost external DA layers may expose users to greater Storage MEV risk.
• MEV-Burning & Redistribution: Some protocols propose burning a portion of extracted Storage MEV or redistributing it to the rollup's users or treasury to align incentives.

Protocols employ several designs to mitigate the negative externalities of Storage MEV.

• Commit-Reveal Schemes: Rollup sequencers can post a commitment to a batch (like a hash) before revealing the full data, reducing front-running opportunities.
• Dual Submission: Submitting critical data (e.g., fraud proofs) through a separate, resistant channel alongside the regular DA layer.
• Enshrined Sequencing: Using the base layer's consensus mechanism (e.g., Ethereum's proposer-builder separation) for rollup batch ordering to inherit its security properties.
• Economic Penalties (Slashing): Designing slashing conditions for validators who demonstrably censor or unfairly order data.

A concrete example illustrates how Storage MEV is extracted.

1. A rollup sequencer creates a batch containing a large, profitable arbitrage transaction on an L2 DEX.
2. The sequencer submits the batch's data to the L1 for availability.
3. An L1 block proposer (aware of the batch's contents) front-runs it by submitting their own transaction to the L1 that performs the same arbitrage on the L2 before the batch data is confirmed.
4. The proposer profits from the arbitrage, and the original sequencer's transaction fails. The value has been extracted via control over data timing.

Understanding Storage MEV requires familiarity with adjacent areas of blockchain mechanics.

• Data Availability (DA): The guarantee that data published to a network is accessible for download and verification; the substrate Storage MEV acts upon.
• Traditional MEV: Value extracted from manipulating the order of executable transactions within a block (e.g., sandwich attacks, arbitrage).
• Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS): A design pattern that separates block building from proposing to mitigate MEV centralization; relevant for Storage MEV solutions.
• EigenLayer & Restaking: Provides a cryptoeconomic security layer that can be used to slash operators for DA censorship, offering a potential mitigation.