MEV is a trading cost

In a dark pool, information leakage is a policy. On a transparent virtual machine, it is physics. A swap that moves an AMM, a liquidation that must hit a book, a rebalance that must touch several pools — each is an announcement. Searchers compete to be the first transaction after that announcement, or to be inside the same bundle as it.

The serious literature in this field — especially Flashbots Writings and the Collective’s working notes — treats that competition as architecture: targeted search versus probabilistic probing, spam as a fee, timing games that dissipate opportunity into gas. We do not republish their papers. We take the conclusion as operational: MEV is a line item.

For a trading system that is honest about on-chain execution, that line item shows up as worse-than-quoted fills, failed transactions, priority fees, and builder or sequencer payments. Hiding those inside ‘slippage’ makes the UI look calm and the P&L unexplained.

Infrastructure work, as we mean it, is making those costs visible and, where the protocol allows, routing around the dumbest versions of them — private orderflow, batch auctions, intents, AMMs that do not advertise a sandwich. That is not the same as promising users they will not pay MEV. On a public chain, that promise is usually a lie.