2023/07/20 by Antoine Rondelet, Rondelet, Antoine, Quintus Kilbourn +1
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Auction Theory and Applications #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Digital Platforms and Economics #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.10878
openalex publication_date 2023/07/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A growing body of literature is aimed at designing private mempools in blockchains. The ultimate goal of this research is addressing several phenomena broadly classed under MEV with sandwich attacks as the canonical example. The literature has primarily viewed MEV as a problem arising from oversights in distributed systems and cryptographic protocol design and has attempted to address it with the standard tool sets from those disciplines. This paper argues that the impact of private mempools on markets and agent incentives renders analyses that do not consider the economic lens incomplete. The paper presents several observations across blockchains and traditional finance to justify this argument and highlight specific dynamics for future study.