Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) drives the prosperity of the blockchain ecosystem. By strategically including, excluding, or reordering transactions within blocks, block producers/validators can extract additional value, which in turn incentivizes them to keep the decentralization of the whole blockchain platform. Before The Merge of Ethereum in Sep. 2022, around \$675M was extracted in terms of MEV. Despite its importance, current measurement works on MEV suffer some limitations. First, current works only focus on transactions of a very limited number of DApps. Second, current methods heavily rely on fixed heuristic rule-based patterns, leading to false negative/positive. Third, the observations and conclusions are outdated to some extent due to the continuously introduced features, like The Merge in Ethereum. To address these challenges, in this work, we first propose two robust methods to identify arbitrage transactions and sandwich attacks, respectively. Then, we apply them to the largest-ever dataset to filter out related MEV transactions. Based on the identified results, we have characterized the overall landscape of the Ethereum MEV ecosystem, the impact the private transaction architectures bring, and the adoption of back-running mechanism. Our research will shed light on future MEV-related work.

翻译：最大可提取价值（MEV）驱动着区块链生态系统的繁荣。通过策略性地包含、排除或重新排序区块内的交易，区块生产者/验证者可以提取额外价值，这反过来激励他们保持整个区块链平台的去中心化。在2022年9月以太坊合并之前，约有6.75亿美元以MEV形式被提取。尽管其重要性显著，当前针对MEV的测量研究仍存在若干局限。首先，现有工作仅聚焦于极少数去中心化应用的交易。其次，当前方法严重依赖基于固定启发式规则的识别模式，导致漏报与误报。第三，由于以太坊合并等新特性的持续引入，现有观测与结论在一定程度上已过时。为应对这些挑战，本研究首先提出两种鲁棒方法，分别用于识别套利交易与三明治攻击。随后，我们将这些方法应用于迄今最大规模的数据集，以筛选相关MEV交易。基于识别结果，我们系统刻画了以太坊MEV生态的整体图景、私有交易架构带来的影响以及尾随机制的采用情况。本研究将为未来MEV相关研究提供重要启示。