Are you ready? It may seem familiar…
Allow more than one computer to decide what the content of each block will be.
To understand why, consider the famous double spending problem: if one computer has complete control over a financial ledger, how can you stop it from spending the same money twice? The answer is that you can’t. Bitcoin famously solved it by building a consensus of many computers where no single computer can get away with theft.
MEV is the equivalent of the double spending problem for Ethereum. If one computer (the miner) has complete control over which transactions go where in a block, how do you stop it from frontrunning, backrunning, sandwiching and generally exploiting everybody else? Again, the answer is that you can’t. To fix it you build a consensus of which transactions go in a block and where and then no single computer can get away with extortion.
This is the purpose of content layer protocols like the Alex.
So if you hear that MEV is too hard to fix remember this:
The double spending problem was considered impossible until it was fixed by consensus. The MEV problem will be fixed the same way.
In my next article I will provide hard data as to the true extent of the data corruption in Ethereum that causes MEV, with direct comparisons to our regulated centralized competitors. I will also discuss how even in the unlikely event that a content layer such as Alex is perfectly colluded against, it still vastly outperforms the current block proposer dominated system.
