'Intelectual Posturing' Highlights Ethereum's Extractable Value Vulnerability

[RSRS]

A "personal project" by a developer might bring even more controversy into the so-called Miner Extractable Value (MEV) practice on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain, possibly tempting some miners to extract all the value they can from Ethereum before it moves to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism (PoS), as this move is forcing them to look for new revenue streams.
The project, initiated by Edgar Aronov, CEO of hackathon platform Eventornado, would allow miners to programmatically reorganize chains to capture MEV, as reorganization, also known as reorg, allows miners to remove previously confirmed blocks from a blockchain. For example, in theory, recent transactions on a blockchain could be rolled back to recover lost funds in a hack.

Meanwhile, MEV is a measure of the profit a miner can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions within the blocks they produce, per Paradigm Research. According to them, if two miners, Mi and Ner, are getting paid USD 100 each and Mi finds a block with a USD 10,000 arbitrage, he may decide to remine the first block, take the arbitrage for himself, after which Mi remines other blocks he found as well, capturing all the MEV there too.

Also, it is known as a "time-bandit" attack: if block rewards are small enough compared to MEV, it can be rational for miners to destabilize consensus, per the researchers.


According to them, MEV is an invisible tax that miners can collect from Ethereum users and it inherently encourages consensus instability. And while hypothetically MEV can also be seen on the Bitcoin (BTC) network, "our hypothesis is that Bitcoin is inherently less exposed to MEV than blockchains like Ethereum," per the researchers.

And now, according to Aronov, his code would allow such "reorg on demand." He also noted that this is not implemented yet, but it's a chance to design the application programming interface (API).

He told Cryptonews.com that this is his "own personal project," that he "just started" it and "it doesn't exist" at the moment.

Sourch