The Debate Over Ethereum MEV: Should It Be Minimized or Boosted?

Plus: Why "toxic MEV" is taboo in the Ethereum community.

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Today's premium content features a behind-the-scenes interview with the pseudonymous Pmcgoohan, founder of zeromev.org, on the topic of miner extractable value (MEV).

In this discussion, Pmcgoohan explains MEV (a rather complex topic) in an elementary style. I think this is might be the best behind-the-scenes interview yet.

With that in mind, here are a few of the topics we covered:

• what miner extractable value (MEV) is and why it is important on Ethereum

• how frontrunning and censorship attacks work on Ethereum

• what MEV costs the normal user every year

• how Pmcghoohan found out about the MEV problem in 2014 and what Vitalik said about MEV back then

• what MEV's effect is on DeFi and NFTs

• what zeromev.org does and how it goes about educating users about MEV

• which L2 chain allows for transactions without MEV

• how Flashbots, a company that optimizes for MEV, works and why zeromev.org doesn't think it is a good long term solution

• what reasons (including decentralization) Flashbots has for maximizing MEV

• proposals that Pmcgoohan thinks have merit regarding solving MEV

• why "toxic MEV" is taboo in Ethereum

• what "fair order" blockchains work

• how MEV could work on other chains like Solana or Avalanche