Briefing
A foundational problem in decentralized finance is the vulnerability of Automated Market Makers to Miner Extractable Value (MEV), a systemic issue that compromises fairness and efficiency. This research proposes a novel mechanism design paradigm that shifts the burden of MEV mitigation from the consensus layer to the application layer, embedding provable security directly within the smart contract logic. The core breakthrough is demonstrating how to construct an AMM that satisfies strategy proofness → a stronger guarantee ensuring users are always incentivized to follow the honest strategy → when operating under a weak assumption of sequencing fairness. This new theory implies that the future of fair and robust decentralized systems relies not solely on complex consensus upgrades, but on a strategic re-engineering of the financial primitives themselves.
Context
The prevailing theoretical limitation in decentralized finance is the inherent challenge of achieving fairness and efficiency in transaction ordering, often framed as a conflict with the block proposer’s incentive to maximize profit (MEV). Prior research focused primarily on consensus-layer solutions, such as encrypted mempools or decentralized sequencers, which attempt to enforce sequencing fairness (e.g. first-in-first-out) across the entire network. However, these approaches often face impossibility results or introduce significant complexity and latency. The academic challenge remained to provide strong, provable economic guarantees against front-running and arbitrage without requiring perfect, global consensus-level fairness.
Analysis
The paper’s core mechanism is an application-layer construct that leverages the concept of sequencing fairness to achieve a stronger guarantee → strategy proofness. The new mechanism is an AMM design that, when implemented on a blockchain with even a weak form of sequencing fairness (where transaction arrival time is honored), makes strategic behavior unprofitable for all participants, including the block proposer. Conceptually, the mechanism operates by dynamically adjusting the transaction’s outcome based on its position relative to others, effectively removing the arbitrage profit opportunity for the proposer. This fundamentally differs from prior approaches by moving the defense from a global, network-wide protocol to a local, application-specific rule, thereby ensuring that the user’s optimal action is always to submit their true demand, regardless of the proposer’s malicious intent.
Parameters
- Strategy Proofness → The strongest economic guarantee, proving that no user can gain an advantage by submitting a dishonest transaction or strategic order.
- Arbitrage Resilience → The first tier of guarantee, proving that the block proposer cannot extract risk-free profit from the AMM mechanism.
- Sequencing Fairness Model → The minimal assumption required from the underlying blockchain, where transaction ordering is based on arrival time, not fee or bribe.
Outlook
This research opens a new avenue for mechanism design, suggesting that complex economic problems like MEV can be solved by shifting the focus to application-specific design rather than relying solely on global consensus modifications. In the next 3-5 years, this theory will likely unlock a new generation of DeFi primitives → including lending protocols, stablecoins, and oracles → that are built with provable strategy proofness by construction. The immediate next step for the academic community is to generalize this application-layer approach to a wider class of smart contract mechanisms and explore its security guarantees under various adversarial network conditions.
