Mitigating MEV with Verifiable Randomness: A VRF-Seeded Fair Transaction Ordering Protocol

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.