Masquerade: Simple and Lightweight Transaction Reordering Mitigation in Blockchains

TL;DR

This paper introduces Masquerade, a lightweight protocol that mitigates transaction reordering in blockchains by using tokens to enforce strict ordering, thereby reducing MEV exploitation and increasing user confidence.

Contribution

It proposes a novel MEV-aware protocol using tokens for transaction ordering, enhancing security without heavy overhead.

Findings

Reduces adversarial benefits from MEV transactions

Increases user satisfaction and confidence

Outperforms existing practices in simulations

Abstract

Blockchains offer strong security gurarantees, but cannot protect users against the ordering of transactions. Players such as miners, bots and validators can reorder various transactions and reap significant profits, called the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). In this paper, we propose an MEV aware protocol design called Masquerade, and show that it will increase user satisfaction and confidence in the system. We propose a strict per-transaction level of ordering to ensure that a transaction is committed either way even if it is revealed. In this protocol, we introduce the notion of a "token" to mitigate the actions taken by an adversary in an attack scenario. Such tokens can be purchased voluntarily by users, who can then choose to include the token numbers in their transactions. If the users include the token in their transactions, then our protocol requires the block-builder to order the transactions strictly according to token numbers. We show through extensive simulations that this reduces the probability that the adversaries can benefit from MEV transactions as compared to existing current practices.