More than 27 prominent Ethereum projects came together to launch MEV Blocker, a solution that aims to address and minimize the amount of value extracted from its users, also known as Maximum Extractable Value (MEV), Ethereum’s invisible tax.
MEV is a tax imposed on decentralized finance (DeFi) users on transactions. MEV bots can hijack mid-stream transactions, such as Ether (ETH) swaps, non-fungible token (NFT) purchases, and ENS registrations, and inflate prices for users. MEV Blocker was co-developed by CoW Swap, Agnostic Relay, and Beaver Build as a free, censorship-resistant tool to counter this persistent “$1.3 billion dollar problem” across the Ethereum ecosystem.
In total, 27 Ethereum projects joined the initiative as launch partners, including Balancer, Gnosis DAO, Shapeshift, and StakeDAO, to name a few. Explaining the intention behind the release of MEV Blocker, Martin Köppelmann, CEO of Gnosis, stated:
“With the release of MEV Blocker, users can benefit from the opportunities they generate. Today all that money is taken by the seeker, but why shouldn’t it be divided with the people who create the value?
MEV Blocker can be added as a custom RPC endpoint to a crypto wallet, which, in turn, can protect users from early execution and sandwiching when using any Ethereum DApp. According to the official announcement, MEV Blocker sends at least 90% of the profits from winning bids to users and 10% to validators as a reward, thus giving “power back to Ethereum users.”
Related: Sandwich trading bots lose bread and butter in $25 million exploit
As entrepreneurs try to cut user taxes, the excitement around the upcoming Shanghai and Capella updates resulted in a bull run for ETH.
Alright, let’s talk about the Ethereum Shanghai update! It is a hard fork scheduled for March 2023. Bettors and validators will be able to withdraw staked ETH from the Beacon Chain. Approximately 16 million ETH staked will be available for withdrawal.
— Branimir Stojanovic (@branelost) April 4, 2023
On April 5, Ether broke above $1,900 for the first time in over seven months. However, it is important to note that the ETH price fell sharply following the execution of the Merger on September 15, 2022.
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