Miner Extractable Value (MEV) refers to the revenue captured by miners who exploit transaction ordering on blockchains for profit, undermining fairness to users. In this talk, I will:

– Introduce the problem of MEV and provide an overview of previously proposed solutions and their limitations.

– Next we will introduce new threshold encryptions schemes and highlight key technical ideas in building them.

– We then show how these schemes can be used to solve two important problems in the MEV space: 1) Removing the Relay in Proposer Builder Separation and 2) Building Encrypted Mempools that protect the privacy of user transactions until they are executed.

– Finally, we will conclude with important open questions in this space.

Based on joint work with Arka Rai Choudhuri, Sanjam Garg, Dimitris Kolonelos, Julien Piet, and Mingyuan Wang.