Plain English
MEV is the profit a validator or sophisticated searcher can extract by manipulating transaction order within a block — front-running, sandwich attacks, liquidation racing, arbitrage. On Ethereum, MEV adds up to billions per year in extracted value, most of it invisible to ordinary users until it hits their fill.
How it actually works
The mempool is public; bots monitor it for profitable patterns and submit competing transactions with higher tips to capture them. Validators select the highest-paying bundles. MEV-Boost is the dominant mechanism on Ethereum: searchers build bundles, builders compete to assemble the most profitable block, validators auction off block space.
What it means for you
Ordinary users get MEVed mostly through slippage on swaps and bad fills. The defenses: private RPCs (MEV Blocker, Flashbots Protect) that bypass the public mempool, MEV-aware aggregators (CoW Swap), and limit orders for non-urgent trades. For active DeFi users, this is a real operational cost — not a theoretical one.
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