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DeFi Education6 min read

MEV Protection: Stop Getting Sandwiched on Your Trades

Understand MEV (Maximal Extractable Value), sandwich attacks, and how to protect your trades from value extraction.

What Is MEV?

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is the profit that block builders, searchers, and validators can extract by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block.

Types of MEV

Sandwich Attacks

  • Attacker sees your large swap in the mempool
  • They front-run your trade (buying before you, raising the price)
  • Your trade executes at a worse price
  • They back-run (selling right after, profiting from the price impact)

    • Arbitrage

    Searchers detect price differences between DEXs and profit by trading between them. This is generally positive — it equalizes prices across markets.

    Liquidations

    Bots race to liquidate unhealthy lending positions for rewards. This keeps lending protocols solvent but can increase costs.

    How Much MEV Costs You

    Studies show MEV costs DeFi users billions annually. A typical sandwich attack extracts 0.5-2% of your trade value on large swaps.

    Protection Strategies

  • Use private mempools: Flashbots Protect sends transactions directly to block builders, bypassing the public mempool
  • Set tight slippage: Lower slippage tolerance limits sandwich profitability
  • Use aggregators with MEV protection: Some aggregators route through protected channels
  • Trade on L2s: MEV is less prevalent (but not absent) on Layer 2s
  • Split large trades: Multiple smaller trades are less attractive targets

    • How Alkizen Protects You

    Alkizen routes trades through optimal paths with built-in slippage protection. Cross-chain swaps through Relay are inherently more resistant to MEV since they involve bridge-level execution rather than public mempool swaps.

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