The Commoditization of Mainnet: A 41-Month Longitudinal Analysis of MEV-Boost Dynamics; The Invisible Tax: MEV and the Politics of Blockchain Infrastructure 197 views

Humans struggle to recognize gradual transformation, making it difficult to pinpoint when a subtle shift crosses into irreversible change. This limitation occurred within the Ethereum ecosystem, where the practice of algorithmic transaction reordering, known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), slowly morphed from an exploit into a formalized network feature. Because these shifts occurred so gradually, the community rarely recognized that anything was fundamentally off. My technical project addresses this by measuring the math-based reality of this slow monopolization over a long timeline. I produced a comprehensive data pipeline designed to measure Ethereum's transition into a highly efficient, yet monopolized, settlement layer. By engineering a system that analyzed extensive event logs and builder datasets over several years, I expanded on foundational surveillance frameworks. By pairing existing metrics with custom price volatility and displacement formulas, my analysis proved that professional MEV-Boost builders slowly accumulated a near-total monopoly over block production. Furthermore, the longitudinal analysis revealed how recent protocol upgrades successfully starved dominant builders of retail order flow and drastically collapsed their extraction margins. My STS research paper investigates the cultural blind spots associated with this monopoly. Through a documentary analysis of Ethereum's forums and manifestos, I explored how the community talked themselves into accepting predatory behavior. Using the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, I tracked how the definition of MEV shifted from "theft" to an "inevitable market force". Once the community accepted this inevitability, the debate effectively ended. I then applied Langdon Winner's theory of Political Technologies to the MEV-Boost software itself, concluding that the middleware is a biased political artifact. The software creates a class system where a few wealthy builders hold absolute authority over the transactions of regular users. Analyzing both technical and cultural data together demonstrates that efficiency is a political choice, and optimizing a system without considering fairness builds a hierarchy by default.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

blockchain; ethereum; MEV; MEV-Boost; social construction of technology; political technologies; defi; decentralized finance

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-15