MEV

Maximal extractable value (MEV) refers to the maximum value that can be extracted from block production more than the standard block reward and gas fees by including, excluding, and changing the order of transactions in a block.

Source: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/mev/

In the new world of DeFi, there are many types of MEVs. And much more are coming with the freshly minted tokens, newly deployed protocols and liquidity pools, just go-lived L1 and L2 solutions, not to mention the incoming PoS of the Eth2 era. Sometimes, the downfall of certain assets would create enormous opportunities for MEV searchers.

Like the financial products and services binding with legal tenders in the old/real world, all the DeFi products and services have to be coupled with certain tokens. Therefore all the MEVs are proceeding via tokens. All the tokens have their valuation based on their relationship with other tokens, traditional legal tenders, Web3, and real-world financial services and products. Sometimes even tweets.

But don’t forget: the real power of affecting the token prices of these tweets is not coming from the tweets themselves but the person and his or her’s control over immense financial assets. The majority of the public would not pay attention to the prediction of Bitcoin’s price coming from some random guy whose net worth is all in the shopping cart he’s been pushing around all day.

All the variations of DeFi result in the rise and fall of asset value in the form of token price fluctuation, which in turn creates MEV opportunities for traders, including arbitrage, Sandwich MEV, and others.