MEV

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value, originally Miner Extractable Value) is the umbrella concept for extra profit available to whoever controls transaction ordering inside a block. Historically miners; now validators, mempool bots, and block builders.

Where it appears

Any public mempool where transactions are visible before inclusion creates opportunities:

• Arbitrage. Two DEXs diverge in price — a bot inserts an arb transaction at the right slot.
• Liquidation. A bot catches a liquidation trigger first and grabs the bonus.
• Front-running. Sees a large swap, gets in ahead, sells after.
• Sandwich. Enters before the victim and exits right after.
• Time-bandit attack (theoretical) — rewriting blocks to capture MEV.

Who extracts it

• Searchers — bots that hunt for opportunities and pack transactions into bundles.
• Builders — assemble blocks from searcher bundles, picking the most profitable combinations.
• Validators / proposers — receive part of MEV revenue through MEV-Boost-like infrastructure.

MEV on TON

TON differs from Ethereum:

1. Sharded architecture. Transactions on different shards are not comparable in ordering terms.
2. Lower fees. Attacks are less profitable on small trades.
3. Less transparent mempool than Ethereum (no public pending pool in the traditional sense).
4. Smaller DEX volumes — fewer arb and sandwich opportunities.

That said, MEV exists on TON: sandwiching of large swaps has been observed and arbitrage between STON.fi and DeDust runs around the clock. As volumes grow, the problem will sharpen.

What users can do

• Avoid loose slippage tolerance on large swaps.
• Use DEX aggregators — splitting trades makes sandwiching less attractive.
• Break large orders into pieces.
• For critical actions (liquidations), consider private mempool / private RPC if available.

MEV is an invisible but persistent tax on DeFi. It cannot be fully removed but can be reduced with deliberate behaviour.