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What is MEV anyway?

By: Alex R. Mead Ph.D.

MEV was never an element of the design of Ethereum—instead, it was an emergent phenomenon, and one that surprised everyone in the crypto community. It went from theoretical to operational (and very profitable) after only a couple of years, raising issues around censorship and centralization. This week, Coin Metrics’ research team is releasing a research report on MEV, which is an additional source of income to validators, and a rapidly-growing niche within the Ethereum ecosystem.

At Coin Metrics, we pride ourselves in pioneering new insights and coverage of new trends and issues in the digital asset industry. MEV is a major consideration going forward for the design of the Ethereum protocol, and may prove to be an issue shared by all smart contract platforms. It is thus critical to understand the interests and logic that undergird MEV so that we can appreciate the impact over Ethereum’s security and the economics of validating. You can download our report, What is MEV anyway?—for free—below.

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Network Data Insights

Summary Metrics

Source: Coin Metrics Network Data Pro

Digital asset markets continued rallying over the week with most major assets in the green. On-chain measures of activity remained near the previous week’s levels with Bitcoin and Ethereum active addresses falling 4% and 3%, respectively.

Meanwhile, as Ethereum core developers continue their progress towards the Shanghai network upgrade, the supply of Lido’s staked ETH (stETH) token surpassed 5M, a new milestone for the liquid staking derivative.

Coin Metrics Updates

This week’s updates from the Coin Metrics team:

• Make sure to also follow Coin Metrics’ market-data focused newsletter State of the Market, which recently surpassed 100 issues!

  

  CoinMetrics.io @coinmetrics

  This week in #crypto: ▪️ Layer-1 platforms make a major comeback ▪️ Popular NFT "Doodles" announces their shift from Ethereum to Flow blockchain ▪️ Ethereum core developers activate a "shadow fork" in preparation for March's Shanghai upgrade Read more: hubs.li/Q01zlvhr0

  

  4:24 PM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

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