The Ethereum Foundation declares MEV the "next major frontier": a new strategy to combat toxic value.
Ethereum Foundation (EF) Interim Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue presented a detailed plan for implementing the foundation's mandate, with the issue of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) taking center stage. In his extensive thread, a logical continuation of recent posts by Vitalik Buterin and Aya Miyaguchi, Aue clearly stated: combating toxic MEV is not a secondary task of market infrastructure, but "the core work of the Ethereum Foundation" and, in essence, "the next major front in the cypherpunk war."
The Essence of the Threat: From Neutrality to Intermediation
Aue emphasized that the EF must strengthen Ethereum as an open infrastructure for user self-sovereignty. Key priorities include censorship resistance, capture protection, open source code, privacy, and security. He directly stated that the organization exists not for short-term speculators or the promotion of individual applications, but to preserve the fundamental properties that distinguish Ethereum from permissioned financial systems.
In the context of MEV, the analyst listed specific risks capable of undermining network neutrality: privileged access to the user transaction order flow, cartelization of builders, trusted relays, opaque transaction routing, and validators' critical dependence on a narrow chain of suppliers. "A formally open network can effectively become an intermediary if users, at the moment of value transfer, depend on a limited number of infrastructure participants," Aue warned.
Encrypted Mempools and Other Pitfalls
The EF intends to support lowering barriers for block creation and validation, strengthen guarantees for transaction inclusion, and develop competitive processing pathways. However, Aue cautioned against simplistic solutions. Encrypted mempools, in his view, can reduce pre-execution transparency and conceal the flow of pending transactions, but simultaneously shift the advantage to new privileged participants, including operators of specialized hardware. He also pointed out the limitations of mechanisms such as FOCIL and ePBS: the former can enhance censorship resistance but create new forms of inter-block MEV, while the latter, by reducing reliance on trusted relays, risks entrenching the current builder economy, hindering more long-term solutions. The key takeaway: piecemeal combat against individual manifestations of MEV is ineffective—value extraction must be considered at the level of the entire system.
Privacy, Salaries in ETH, and Staking
The second major theme was privacy. Aue advocated for a model where unconditional confidentiality first becomes available at the base layer, with mechanisms for selective disclosure added on top. "A public ledger without serious privacy settings by default becomes a surveillance infrastructure with settlement guarantees," he stated.
On a practical level, the EF plans to gradually transition employee compensation and core financial relationships into ETH and "Ethereum-native" stablecoins. This is not a symbolic gesture, but a way to test the infrastructure on itself, facing the same issues as ordinary users: wallet UX, volatility, privacy, and payment friction.
The concentration of staking was addressed separately, which Aue called not a revenue-generating product, but an infrastructural risk to the protocol. If the staking share, liquidity, and access to validators become concentrated around a small number of issuers, Ethereum's security could become vulnerable through the economic layer.
My view as an analyst: this thread is not just a declaration, but a clear signal to the market. The EF is finally formulating a systemic approach to MEV, acknowledging that combating it requires not technical patches, but a fundamental restructuring of the transaction economy. It is particularly telling that Aue synchronizes his rhetoric with the recent launch of the independent R&D laboratory Ethlabs by former EF researchers, indicating a consolidation of efforts around this critical issue.