Over 27 prominent Ethereum projects joined hands to launch MEV Blocker, a solution that aims to tackle and minimize the amount of value extracted from their users — aka maximally extractable value (MEV), Ethereum’s invisible tax.
MEV is a tax imposed on decentralized finance (DeFi) users on transactions. MEV bots can hijack transactions midway, such as Ether (ETH) trades, nonfungible token (NFT) purchases and Ethereum Name Service registrations, and inflate prices for the users. MEV Blocker was jointly developed by CoW Swap, Agnostic Relay and Beaver Build as a free and censorship-resistant tool to counter this “$1.3 billion dollar problem” persistent 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 launching MEV Blocker, Martin Köppelmann, CEO of Gnosis, stated:
“With the launch of MEV Blocker, users can profit from the backrunning opportunities they create. Today all of that money is taken by the searcher, but why shouldn’t it be split with the people who create the value?”
MEV Blocker can be added as a custom remote procedure call endpoint to a crypto wallet, which, in turn, can protect users from frontrunning and sandwiching when using any Ethereum decentralized application. According to the official announcement, MEV Blocker sends at least 90% of the profits from winning bids back 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 $25M exploit
While entrepreneurs attempt to reduce the taxation on users, the excitement around the upcoming Shanghai and Capella upgrades resulted in a bull sprint for ETH.
Alright, let’s talk about the Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade! It’s a hard fork scheduled to occur in March 2023. Stakers and validators will be able to withdraw staked ETH from the Beacon Chain. Approximately 16 million staked ETH will be available for withdrawal.
— Branimir Stojanović (@branelost) April 4, 2023
On April 5, Ether breached $1,900 for the first time in over seven months. However, it is important to note that the price of ETH dropped sharply following the execution of the Merge on Sept. 15, 2022.
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