Formalizing Maximal Extractable Value for Provable Security against Economic Attacks → Research

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Briefing

The core research problem is the lack of a rigorous, universal theoretical framework to analyze and prove security against Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) attacks, which exploit transaction ordering for economic gain. The foundational breakthrough is the proposal of a formal, abstract model of a blockchain and its smart contract execution environment, which defines MEV as a specific class of economic attacks on the transaction-ordering mechanism. This new theoretical basis allows for the formal derivation of security proofs, establishing a new paradigm for designing protocols with provable resilience against adversarial transaction manipulation.

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Context

Prior to this work, MEV was primarily studied through empirical analysis and ad-hoc mitigation strategies, lacking a unified academic definition or a generalizable mathematical model. The prevailing limitation was the inability to formally prove a protocol’s security against MEV; defenses were often reactive and specific to a single attack vector, relying on heuristics rather than foundational, abstract security guarantees.

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Analysis

The paper’s core mechanism is the creation of a general, abstract model that captures the essential components of any public blockchain → a state machine, a transaction pool, and a block producer with transaction-ordering power. Within this model, MEV is formally defined as the maximal profit an adversary can extract by manipulating the sequence of transactions in a block. This framework fundamentally differs from previous approaches by shifting the analysis from protocol-specific code to the abstract mechanism of transaction inclusion and ordering, allowing security proofs to be derived from first principles of game theory and distributed systems.

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Parameters

Abstract Model Components → State Machine, Transaction Pool, Block Producer. (These are the three formal primitives used to define the blockchain environment for MEV analysis.)
MEV Definition Basis → Transaction Reordering, Insertion, Dropping. (The specific adversarial actions formalized by the model to calculate maximal extractable value.)

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Outlook

This formal MEV theory provides the necessary academic foundation for the next generation of mechanism design. Future research will focus on translating these abstract security proofs into practical, provably MEV-resistant consensus protocols and transaction-ordering mechanisms, such as fair ordering services and decentralized sequencers. Over the next few years, this work will enable the creation of systems where transaction fairness is not an empirical goal but a cryptographically or game-theoretically proven property, fundamentally stabilizing the economic security of decentralized finance applications.

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Verdict

This formal theory establishes the essential academic language required to prove the economic security of all future decentralized transaction-ordering mechanisms.

Maximal Extractable Value, MEV formal theory, Transaction ordering attacks, Blockchain security proofs, Abstract blockchain model, Economic security analysis, Protocol mechanism design, Smart contract security, Decentralized finance risks, Transaction reordering risk, Formal verification systems, Foundational cryptography research, Byzantine fault tolerance, Consensus algorithm security Signal Acquired from → arxiv.org