Summary of Proposal
The MEV & Fair Ordering Hub is an open, technical, marketing-free space for understanding how transaction ordering shapes Ethereum. Across four days, searchers, solvers, researchers, builders, and newcomers will debate emerging mechanisms and explore practical ways to reduce harmful extraction, improve execution, and make MEV distribution fairer for users and protocols.
Motivation and Rationale
MEV sits between a user signing a transaction and that transaction becoming part of Ethereum history. It affects execution quality, protocol revenue, LP returns, validator and builder incentives, censorship resistance, privacy, and the design of wallets, DEXs, intents, rollups, and other applications. Yet the topic remains unusually difficult to learn from the outside because much of the useful knowledge is highly technical and fragmented across the industry participants.
MEV Hub brings these perspectives into one neutral space. A newcomer should be able to walk in, understand the path of a transaction end-to-end, and ask practitioners what actually happens after they press “swap” or “send” and where things like slippage actually comes from. Experienced builders and researchers should be able to go much deeper through mechanism-design debates, aligning economic incentives across the industry, state of the art protocol design and discussions of open problems.
The topic directly complements Devcon 8’s CROPS priorities because MEV sits at the intersection of several Ethereum’s fundamentals. Transaction ordering and inclusion are closely tied to censorship resistance, while the choice between public and private order flow, as well as emerging approaches such as encrypted mempools, raises important privacy questions. At the application level, sandwiches, toxic flow, liquidation races and other forms of adversarial ordering create tangible security and economic risks for both users and protocols. Meanwhile, making the MEV supply chain more transparent through open datasets, researches, shared terminology and public tools can help make this increasingly important part of Ethereum understandable beyond a small circle of authorities.
The Community Hub is a better format than a single talk or even a series of talks on MEV, since the topic itself is too broad to effectively cover both an introduction for newcomers and pressing issues for professionals within a single presentation. The Hub mixes people from different levels of the MEV supply chain with regular users in a single, productive discussion that could help shape the future of transaction ordering.
Implementation
The standard RFP-13 Community Hub setup is sufficient. We would use the LED screen for presentations, visualizations, demos, and short talks; the whiteboards for “Trace a Transaction” and the MEV Design Clinic; the cork boards for “Ask MEV Anything” and open research questions; and the worktable for office hours and small-group discussions. The Hub does not require custom fabrication or heavy AV. If available, one handheld or clip-on microphone / compact speaker would be helpful for Q&A in a noisy surrounding area.
Programming
Daily structure
The hub runs all four days of Devcon, from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm each day. Every day runs the same basic shape: a morning welcome block, 2-3 structured sessions, and a set of activities built for direct interaction with the community. Every day includes open office hours (no schedule, just bring your transaction and we’ll trace it live), a running whiteboard wall where anyone can leave a question during the day and get it answered by a speaker or organizer by evening, and a closing open floor at the end of the day for open discussion and networking, no structure needed.
Draft of the program
Day 1: Foundations - What MEV Actually Is and How It Moves Through the System. On the first day, we lay the groundwork that everything else in the hub builds on: what MEV actually is, how transactions sit in the mempool before they’re ever included in a block, and how builders and relays quietly decide what gets in and in what order. It’s designed to make sense to someone walking in with zero background, but alongside that entry-level material, we’re weaving in more advanced findings drawn from our own ongoing research, so that people who already work in this space leave with something they didn’t already know, rather than sitting through a recap.
Day 2: Fair Ordering and Censorship-Resistance - Who Actually Controls What Goes Into a Block. The second day turns to a question that sits right at the center of what makes a blockchain censorship-resistant in the first place: who, in practice, controls the order in which transactions land in a block, and what mechanisms exist to keep that power from concentrating in the hands of whoever happens to be fastest or best resourced. We’ll dig into encrypted mempools, inclusion lists, and the shift from PBS toward ePBS, along with intent-hiding techniques, treating each as a concrete answer to that underlying problem rather than an abstract theoretical proposal.
Day 3: The MEV Protection Design Landscape - How Applications Defend the People Using Them. Day three carries that same concern about fairness down into the applications people actually use every day, looking at how individual protocols design their way around MEV rather than relying on changes to the base protocol. That means walking through AMM-level defenses such as hooks and dynamic fees, intent-based batch auctions, and LVR-protected market designs, laid out side by side so attendees can weigh the tradeoffs for themselves instead of being handed a single preferred answer.
Day 4: Trends and the Future of the Industry - the Open Problems Still Shaping This Space. The final day is deliberately forward-looking: rather than reviewing what already exists, we open up the problems that remain genuinely unresolved and the mechanisms that are still being figured out in real time, using the space of the hub to surface where the field seems to be heading next and close out the four days on that note.
Possible speakers and contributors
Both organizing teams have broad connections across the MEV and DeFi ecosystem. We expect to invite contributors from leading DeFi applications, block builders, searchers and independent MEV researchers. These are possible contributors, not announced commitments. We will also keep open programming slots for India-based contributors.
Audience
One Hub, two depth levels – this is the MEV Hub’s thesis. Every day will serve both newcomers and experts. Sessions will be clearly marked as 101, Practitioner, or Research so attendees can choose the right depth without watering down advanced content or making introductory sessions inaccessible.
The main challenge is that both a beginner and an expert should have a reason to spend time in the Hub. Repeatable primers and transaction tracing create an accessible entry point, while practitioner/research sessions, clinics and open-problem roundtables provide depth.
We will actively involve India’s Ethereum community through an open call for local MEV, DeFi, security, and protocol contributors, outreach to local builder communities, flexible programming slots, and mixed panels with global practitioners and local builders. All Hub programming will remain open to every Devcon attendee.
Team
MEV Hub is a joint initiative of MEV-X and Barter. Aya (Researcher & BD Lead at MEV-X) and Alex (Head of Research at Barter) will coordinate programming, contributors and speaker outreach. Additional people from both teams will staff the space throughout all four Devcon days, run office hours, and support live demos. Both teams have complementary first-party experience in the MEV supply chain.
For quick contact: Telegram @ex_seoeva
Proof of expertise
MEV-X approaches the topic from the searcher/arbitrage side, working across both MEV protection and MEV extraction. The team runs atomic-arbitrage and other non-toxic MEV strategies across multiple EVM networks, and is active in MEV research, with work featured twice in Flashbots’ MEV Letter. Its MEV-internalization hook has received a Uniswap Foundation Security Fund grant and been accepted into Uniswap’s hooks accelerator program. The team also builds public-good tools for the community, including a MEV Explorer.
Barter approaches the same system from the orderflow facing and execution side. Barter has operated since 2023, is one of the earliest and largest solvers on CoWSwap, and its solver/router has executed more than $37B of trading volume on Ethereum alone. The team directly addresses DEX routing and MEV-aware transaction settling. Barter has raised a $3M seed round led by Maven11.
Some of the teams’ publications and research include:
- From Impermanent Loss to Sustainable Gain: Quantifying Profitability Zones for Liquidity Providers on DEX
- The Origins of MEV: Systematic Attribution of Arbitrage Opportunity Creation at Scale
- The Bidding Games: Reinforcement Learning for MEV Extraction on Polygon Blockchain
- Market structure of private liquidity on Ethereum
- State of stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps on Ethereum
Neutrality
MEV Hub will be marketing-free and organized around mechanisms and open questions, not around either organizing company. The space will use neutral MEV Hub branding; there will be no token promotion, sales activity, product pitches, or single-vendor sessions. Speakers disclose affiliations at the start of their session, and each day’s program is reviewed by an organizer from the other team rather than approved from within a single side. Sessions are selected for educational value, and competing viewpoints are actively included.
Languages
The program will be in English. The organizing teams can also communicate in Russian and Italian. India-based contributors and volunteers are widely open to help involve local communities.
