MEV-ACE: Identity-Authenticated Fair Ordering for Proposer-Controlled MEV Mitigation

TL;DR

MEV ACE introduces a blockchain protocol that ensures fair transaction ordering by authenticating identities, enabling verifiable commitments, and using randomness to prevent proposer manipulation and censorship.

Contribution

It presents a novel fair ordering protocol combining authenticated identities, auditable commitments, and verifiable delay randomness to mitigate proposer-controlled MEV.

Findings

Protocol guarantees order unpredictability after commitment set is fixed.

Authenticity of commitments is ensured under signature unforgeability.

Accountable inclusion is achieved for transactions with threshold receipts.

Abstract

Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, remains a structural threat to blockchain fairness because a block producer can often observe pending transactions and unilaterally decide their ordering or inclusion. Existing mitigations hide transaction contents or outsource ordering, but they often leave two gaps unresolved. First, commitments are not authenticated by slashable identities. Second, inclusion obligations are not backed by transferable evidence that other validators can verify. This paper presents MEV ACE, a fair ordering protocol for proposer controlled ordering MEV. MEV ACE combines three mechanisms. First, it uses registered economic identities whose authentication keys are deterministically derived from the ACE GF framework and bonded on chain. Second, it uses authenticated commit and open messages with validator receipt thresholds, which make admissibility and inclusion obligations independently auditable. Third, it uses verifiable delay based randomness to determine transaction order only after the admissible commitment set is fixed. We formalize the protocol in a Byzantine fault tolerant validator model with threshold receipts and show three properties under standard assumptions: order unpredictability after the admissible set is locked, commitment authenticity under signature unforgeability, and accountable inclusion for transactions that obtain threshold commit and open receipts. Under these conditions, and when producer and user bonds exceed the one slot gain from invalid execution or selective non opening, MEV ACE removes unilateral proposer discretion over front running, sandwich attacks, and censorship against admitted transactions. The protocol remains single slot in structure, requires no threshold decryption committee, and is compatible with post quantum signature schemes such as ML DSA 44.