Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is a crucial challenge in blockchains and cryptocurrencies. A principal countermeasure is using encrypted mempools to hide the transaction payloads until they are committed in a block. However, the existing approaches based on encrypted mempools remain vulnerable to metadata leakage and may not provide sufficient mitigation against block producers due to their sole control in block preparation. In this paper, we propose techniques that utilize randomized permutation on the committed block, offering a multi-layer solution. With a focus on proof-of-stake (PoS) committee-based consensus, we then introduce BlindPerm, a framework that enhances an encrypted mempool with permutation and present various optimizations. Notably, we propose a construction where this enhancement comes at essentially no overhead by piggybacking on the encrypted mempool and without relying on any external entity such as randomness beacon. Further, we illustrate the effectiveness of our solutions by running simulations using historical Ethereum data.
@InProceedings{kavousi_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.36,
author = {Kavousi, Alireza and Le, Duc V. and Jovanovic, Philipp and Danezis, George},
title = {{BlindPerm: Efficient MEV Mitigation with an Encrypted Mempool and Permutation}},
booktitle = {29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)},
pages = {36:1--36:21},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-409-3},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2026},
volume = {361},
editor = {Arusoaie, Andrei and Onica, Emanuel and Spear, Michael and Tucci-Piergiovanni, Sara},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.36},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-252091},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.36},
annote = {Keywords: Encrypted mempool, maximal extractable value, distributed systems}
}