Citation

Mancino, D., Sevim, H.O. “SoK: The Evolution of Maximal Extractable Value, From Miners to Cross-Chain.” arXiv:2603.07716v1 [cs.CR] (Mar 8, 2026). University of Milano-Bicocca / University of Camerino.

Core Contribution

Systematization of Knowledge organizing MEV literature into a three-era chronological framework that reveals how academic understanding, industry practice, and protocol design co-evolved.

The Three Eras

Era I: August 2014 – August 2020 (Miner Extractable Value)

  • Start: pmcgoohan’s Reddit warning (Aug 2014) — first public articulation of miner ordering power
  • Key milestones: “Dark Forest” recognition; Priority Gas Auctions (PGAs); Flash Boys 2.0 paper (2019)
  • Dominant paradigm: PoW public mempool; miner controls ordering; value extracted via gas wars
  • Infrastructure: no specialized tools; pure gas fee competition
  • Measurement: limited; Daian et al. identified >$6M in atomic arbitrages

Era II: August 2020 – April 2024 (Maximal Extractable Value)

  • Start: Flashbots launch (Aug 2020) — generalization to “maximal” extractable value
  • Key milestones: Formal taxonomies; Realized Extractable Value (REV); PBS/MEV-Boost; Ethereum Merge (Sep 2022)
  • Dominant paradigm: PoS with proposer-builder separation; private order flow; searcher-builder integration
  • Infrastructure: MEV-Boost, relays, private mempools, searcher bundles
  • Scale: CEX-DEX arbitrage alone: $233.8M over 19 months (Aug 2023 – Mar 2025, Wu et al.)

Era III: April 2024 – Present (Cross-Chain MEV)

  • Start: Dencun upgrade (Mar 2024) — meaningful L2 activity on blobs
  • Key milestones: Early L2 MEV studies; cross-chain bridge arbitrage; L2 sequencer MEV
  • Dominant paradigm: MEV spans multiple blockchains, rollups, bridges, sequencers
  • Scale: 242,535 cross-chain arbitrages generating $8.65M profit (Oz et al.) — lower bound

Conceptual Taxonomy

The SoK distinguishes:

  • Potential MEV vs. Realized MEV (REV): much MEV is theoretically extractable but left on the table
  • Single-domain MEV: within one chain/block
  • Cross-domain MEV: spanning chains, bridges, or time boundaries

Key Research Gaps Identified

  1. Standardized metrics: no agreed-upon measurement protocol across papers; results not comparable
  2. Detection benchmarks: adversarial evaluation datasets for MEV detection tools are absent
  3. Cross-chain infrastructure design: few formal frameworks for cross-chain MEV mitigation
  4. Counterfactual analysis: what MEV would be extracted under different protocol designs

Mitigations by Era

  • Era I mitigations: Flashbots bundle system; gas limit increases
  • Era II mitigations: MEV-Boost relay policies; OFAC censorship; PBS; private order flow for users
  • Era III mitigations (emerging): ePBS; FOCIL; encrypted mempools; EEZ synchronous composability

Relationship to Wiki

This SoK confirms and organizes claims already distributed across multiple wiki pages. The three-era framing is useful for understanding why protocols evolved the way they did.