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MEV Masters: Value Extraction in the Dark Forest
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Key Takeaways
28 min read
  • MEV Bot labeled wallets were identified as extracting the most profit in this segment, while Flashboys and Sandwich Attacker labels recorded higher ROI.
  • The data also showed that the MEV market is extremely concentrated. The top 1% of profitable wallets were able to capture more than 49% of all profits generated.
  • Some of the risks involved in investing in this space were also quantified, showing that wallets identified as active in the space (using Nansen labels) lost in total a sum amounting to around ~$126m.
  • The study also found that the prevalence of censorship-compliant MEV-boost relays is on the decline, and with it, the percentage of censorship-compliant blocks per day.

Introduction

The MEV market has been expanding steadily over the last few years. When Flash Boys 2.0 came out back in 2019, it shined a light into the practice, and by the start of DeFi Summer (when DeFi TVL was around $1bn), the cumulative value of MEV extracted on Ethereum had reached around $3.5m. Today that value has increased to over $680m. This report tries to gain insight into this market by looking at some of the most active wallet addresses identified by Nansen labels.

A look Into MEV Wallets Using Nansen Labels

In order to gain insight into the MEV market, this report looked at the on-chain activity of wallet addresses...