Carla Piazza

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to the maximum profit that Blockchain users–including miners and validators–can extract through strategic transaction manipulation and block reordering. With the rise of smart contracts, MEV has become increasingly pervasive, distorting the intended behavior of smart contracts and accumulating to billions of dollars annually. In response, Flashbots has emerged as a community focused on developing solutions to mitigate MEV. These solutions primarily rely on private pools of users and miners, bypassing the public mempool to protect transactions by directly proposing new blocks. However, it has been observed that such approaches merely shift the problem to a different level, redistributing MEV gains rather than eliminating them. In this paper, we take the perspective of a user preparing to deploy a new smart contract on the Blockchain, aiming to understand how their contract might become a target for MEV and how modifications could reduce the risk of exploitation. Specifically, we explore the use of noninterference, formalized through unwinding conditions, to identify potential sources of MEV, while leveraging oracles and other techniques to create an additional verification layer that can be integrated before executing high-value transactions. We demonstrate our methodology through a case study of a betting contract, using formal modeling to show both the strengths and limitations of our approach.

Epigenetic variation and somatic mutations represent molecular components of biodiversity that directly link the genome to the environment