TY - GEN
T1 - Mitigating MEV with Verifiable Randomness
T2 - 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2026
AU - Noreen, Tayyaba
AU - Haider, M. Zeeshan
AU - Zhang, Kaiwen
AU - Bensalem, Hachem
AU - Gagnon, Ghyslain
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2026/6/9
Y1 - 2026/6/9
N2 - Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) poses a significant threat to blockchain systems, where validators manipulate transaction ordering for financial gain. While current mitigation strategies exist, they often introduce protocol complexity or centralization trade-offs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and verifiable ordering protocol that neutralizes these attacks by randomizing the execution order of transactions from the public mempool. The protocol uses a deterministic Fisher-Yates shuffle, seeded by a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) and a secure commit-reveal scheme. Crucially, our approach preserves the native fee market by selecting transactions by gas price, and introduces no new trust assumptions. Our results show that the proposed protocol achieves up to 96% reduction in intra-block attacks (front-running, back-running, and sandwich), while sustaining high throughput. This is achieved with practical performance, maintaining 7,600-9,000 TPS while shuffling and verification latencies start at just 10 ms and 22 ms, respectively. These results highlight verifiable randomness as a practical solution for fair ordering with minimal overhead.
AB - Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) poses a significant threat to blockchain systems, where validators manipulate transaction ordering for financial gain. While current mitigation strategies exist, they often introduce protocol complexity or centralization trade-offs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and verifiable ordering protocol that neutralizes these attacks by randomizing the execution order of transactions from the public mempool. The protocol uses a deterministic Fisher-Yates shuffle, seeded by a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) and a secure commit-reveal scheme. Crucially, our approach preserves the native fee market by selecting transactions by gas price, and introduces no new trust assumptions. Our results show that the proposed protocol achieves up to 96% reduction in intra-block attacks (front-running, back-running, and sandwich), while sustaining high throughput. This is achieved with practical performance, maintaining 7,600-9,000 TPS while shuffling and verification latencies start at just 10 ms and 22 ms, respectively. These results highlight verifiable randomness as a practical solution for fair ordering with minimal overhead.
KW - MEV
KW - VRF
KW - back-running
KW - commit-reveal scheme
KW - fisher-yates shuffling
KW - front-running
KW - sandwich attacks
KW - transaction ordering
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105042799597
U2 - 10.1145/3748522.3779744
DO - 10.1145/3748522.3779744
M3 - Contribution to conference proceedings
AN - SCOPUS:105042799597
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
SP - 475
EP - 484
BT - SAC 2026 - 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 23 March 2026 through 27 March 2026
ER -