Hi everyone,
We’d like to share our recent research on MEV dynamics in Polygon, with a focus on Backrun Atomic Arbitrage. We analyzed 23M blocks (Jan 2023–Oct 2024) to examine market trends, extraction strategies, and the growing role of structured solutions.
Key findings:
- Spam methods made up 94.7% of atomic arbitrage transactions (11M+), but with much lower efficiency
- Structured methods (e.g., FastLane) steadily grew, peaking at 25% share, showing searchers’ shift toward predictable and efficient execution
- These approaches achieved ~2.6x higher MEV per tx (3.09 vs. 1.19 MATIC) while cutting redundant bids
Overall, we observed a clear trend away from brute-force spam toward optimized, sustainability-driven extraction in the case of Polygon.
- Short write-up: https://medium.com/@MEV-X/mev-trends-on-polygon-a-study-of-atomic-arbitrage-5ad569b0b550
- Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21473
Our team is always open to dialogue. At the moment, we’re extending this research by expanding the dataset across more AMMs and PMMs, as well as conducting deeper studies on auction mechanisms, in particular, bribery dynamics in MEV extraction.
Looking forward to your thoughts and discussion!