MEV’s Impact on Market Microstructure

Action

MEV’s impact on market microstructure manifests primarily through strategic transaction ordering and insertion, influencing block construction and subsequent price discovery. This dynamic introduces a competitive environment where searchers actively seek opportunities to profit from discrepancies across decentralized exchanges and within individual blocks, altering conventional order flow. Consequently, frontrunning, backrunning, and sandwich attacks become prevalent, demanding sophisticated mitigation strategies from market participants and protocol developers. The resulting action fundamentally shifts the equilibrium of trading, creating a new layer of complexity in execution and risk management.