MEV, Mempools, Intents and Auctions
Introduction
Transactions compete for inclusion and position. This branch studies the execution market around public/private order flow, proposers/builders/searchers, and intent systems that delegate route selection to solvers.
Why It Matters
Protocol outcome can depend on who observes an order, who may reorder it, which private channel receives it, how surplus is assigned, and whether a solver or builder can censor, collude, or replay.
Mental Model
Separate user validity constraints from execution preferences and ordering mechanism. A signed intent authorizes a result space; solvers propose fills; settlement verifies signatures, nonces, remaining quantities, deadlines, slippage, conservation, and surplus rules.
Questions This Branch Answers
- Which actors learn, order, include, exclude, or execute an order?
- What guarantees does private order flow add or remove?
- How does an auction make fills and surplus measurable?
Scope
Public mempools, PBS roles, frontrunning/backrunning/sandwiches, bundles/private flow/censorship, intents/solvers, partial fills, batch/uniform-price auctions, encrypted mempool and MEV-aware design contrasts.
Out of Scope
Profitable search strategies, live bot deployment, transaction manipulation against public users, universal fairness claims, and assuming private submission eliminates MEV.
Dependencies
block production, signed authorization, market execution, and auction state machines.
Candidate Note Roadmap
public-mempool-and-ordering— Observe propagation, bidding, inclusion, ordering, and replacement semantics.proposers-builders-searchers-and-pbs— Map specialized roles, commitments, payments, and trust.frontrunning-backrunning-and-sandwiches— Reproduce ordering-dependent value and user harm locally.bundles-private-order-flow-and-censorship— Compare confidentiality, inclusion, leakage, and centralization assumptions.signed-intents-solvers-and-validity— Specify authorized outcomes instead of a single execution path.partial-fills-surplus-and-slippage— Account for remaining quantity, price bounds, and value allocation.batch-and-uniform-price-auctions— Design deterministic clearing and tie-breaking rules.encrypted-mempools-and-mev-aware-design— Contrast delayed disclosure and protocol-level mitigations.
Future Project
A local Batch Intent Auction with EIP-712 orders, multiple synthetic solvers, partial fills, uniform clearing, explicit surplus allocation, adversarial ordering, and a fairness/availability dashboard.
Initial Invariants
Fills respect signer, nonce, expiry, remaining quantity, asset pair, receiver, and slippage; batches conserve assets; no order executes twice; tie-breaking and surplus rules are deterministic and observable.
Initial Threat Model
Frontrunning, sandwiching, replay, fill races, solver collusion/censorship, private-flow leakage, builder exclusion, fake competition, surplus theft, denial of service, and misleading wallet previews.
Primary Sources
Ethereum builder/proposer documentation, Flashbots primary research, maintained intent/auction specifications, and sources in SOURCES.md.
Connects to: wallet authorization, sequencer ordering, and execution monitoring.