International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Maximal extractable value (MEV) in the context of blockchains and cryptocurrencies refers to the highest potential profit that an actor, particularly a miner or validator, can achieve through their ability to include, exclude, or re-order transactions within the blocks. MEV has become a topic of concern within the Web3 community as it impacts the fairness and security of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In this work, we propose and explore techniques that utilize randomized permutations to shuffle the order of transactions of a committed block before they are executed. We also show that existing MEV mitigation approaches using an encrypted mempool can be readily extended by permutation-based techniques, thus providing multi-layer protection. With a focus on BFT consensus, we then propose BlindPerm, a framework enhancing an encrypted mempool with permutation at essentially no additional overheads and present various optimizations. Finally, we demonstrate how to extend our mitigation technique to support PoW longest-chain consensus protocols.