The MEV Letter is a weekly collection of papers, articles and resources related to MEV. The intention of this letter is to provide a comprehensive summary of the latest research, discussions, and developments in the space, with links for further reading.
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Papers & Articles
- Timing Games: Probabilistic backrunning and spam by @BrunoMr, @Christoph, and Akaki Mamageishvili model probabilistic backrunning on blockchains as a timing game of costly actions and characterize its unique symmetric equilibrium.
- Open vs. Sealed: Auction Format Choice for Maximal Extractable Value by Aleksei Adadurov, Sergey Barseghyan, Anton Chtepine, Antero Eloranta, Andrei Sebyakin, and Arsenii Valitov studies optimal auction design for MEV markets on Ethereum by comparing first-price sealed-bid, second-price sealed-bid, English, Dutch, and all-pay.
- The Ethereum Foundation Mandate by Ethereum Foundation presents their role, principles, and mission to keep Ethereum trustless, permissionless, and resilient enough to pass the walkaway test.
- A Deeper Look at a New Protocol Cluster Priority: Hardness by Fredrik Svantes, Thomas Thiery, and parithosh gives an overview of the Harden the L1 track, as introduced in Protocol Priorities Update for 2026, and its commitment to preserving Ethereum’s core guarantees of open source, censorship resistance, privacy, security, permissionlessness, and trust minimization.
- Proof-of-Time: From Trust-Based to Physics-Based Transaction Ordering by OpenTTT Research Team presents OpenTTT and outlines how Proof-of-Time is designed to cryptographically prove transaction arrival order as a way to mitigate MEV.
- Rational Finality Stalls and the Risks of Pre-Finality Actions in Ethereum-Anchored Systems by Rujia Li describes a rational finality stall in which a coalition of validators withholds attestations to temporarily delay Ethereum finality without breaking consensus.
- Why Ethereum needs an Encrypted Mempool by Julian Ma argues that Ethereum needs an encrypted mempool to prevent sandwiching and accelerate the maturation of onchain markets.
- The Fast Confirmation Rule. Ethereum Confirmations within 13 seconds by Julian Ma explains how the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) is designed to reduce deposit times from Ethereum L1 to L2s and CEXes to a single slot.
- Encrypted frame transactions by Thomas Thiery present a design for same-slot encrypted execution by separating ordering from execution and requiring the builder to commit to the transaction order before the decryption key is revealed.
- FOCIL
Native Account Abstraction by Thomas Thiery explains how FOCIL and Frame Transaction interact and defines a public mempool eligible FrameTx subset with a stricter omission check.
- Why Ethereum Needs a Dynamically Available Protocol by Luca Zanolini presents a two-layer consensus architecture where a fast available chain and a separate finality mechanism are fully decoupled.
- Revisiting Falcon signature aggregation for PQ mempools by Antonio Sanso, Thomas Thiery, and Benedikt Wagner compares the size of signatures and aggregates for transactions using Falcon signatures under different assumptions about key recovery and aggregation for PQ Ethereum transactions.
- The Untapped Gardens: Finding Ethereum’s Organic Yield by Charles St. Louis details how most DeFi yields are sourced from external inputs or validator economics, and suggests ways for Ethereum to financialize its native resource markets of compute, storage, and execution to generate more native yield.
- POST MORTEM: AUSDT→ AAAVE Trade Incident (Block 24643151) by CoW DAO provides a technical overview of the extreme price impact that caused a user to exchange $50M of aUSDT for $36k of aAAVE.
- The $50M UI Lie: Aave Showed a Good Swap, CoW Solved the Worst One by Ehsan describes how Aave’s interface showed an optimistic quote while posting a materially different CoW order, enabling a solver to route $50M through a low-liquidity pool despite better liquidity being available.
- We need Encrypted Data Availability (+ mempools), and the Death of PBS by rain & coffee argues that implementing MCP without an encrypted mempool for DA would amplify MEV through timing games.
- What does the Ethereum Foundation even do? by binji details how the Ethereum Foundation supports the long-term health of the Ethereum ecosystem by funding core infrastructure, research, education, and development.
Posts & Threads
- Stani Kulechov published a post detailing how the Aave interface led to a user swapping $50M of aUSDT for $36k aAAVE, and efforts to return $600K in fees collected from the transaction.
- Anders Elowsson published a thread announcing that the full EIP-8184: LUCID encrypted mempool has been published.
- Ethereum Foundation published a thread, authored by polar and Mykola Siusko, outlining how Ethereum’s privacy ecosystem is undergoing an evolution, and highlights applications that enable onchain privacy for users.
- Vitalik Buterin published a thread suggesting that the separation of EL and CL clients should be revisited in order to reduce the complexity of running a node.
Talks & Discussions
- All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #232, March 12, 2026 hosted by Ansgar Dietrichs discussed Glamsterdam devnet updates, Hegotá headliner selection, SSZ on the engine API, and more.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #74, March 16, 2026 hosted by parithosh covered updates from Glamsterdam devnets.
- Encrypt The Mempool #2 hosted by Justin Florentine discussed the latest updates related to EIP-8184: LUCID encrypted mempool.
- Glamsterdam Repricings #4, Mar 18, 2026 hosted by Maria InĂŞs Silva discussed EIP-8037: State Creation Gas Cost Increase, benchmark updates, and more.
- Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) #5, March 17, 2026 hosted by Will Corcoran covered specification updates, client implementations, and testing of Fast Confirmation Rule.
Other
- FCR — Fast Confirmation Rule by Ethereum Foundation presents a feature for CL clients that reduces L2 and CEX deposit confirmation times to a single slot, without requiring a hard fork.
- Thread by Ansgar Dietrichs
- Post by binji
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