The Origins of MEV: Systematic Attribution of Arbitrage Opportunity Creation at Scale

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents billions of dollars in extracted value that shapes blockchain dynamics, but until now we lacked systematic ways to trace where arbitrage opportunities originate. Researchers from a team led by Andrei Seoev have published a paper on arXiv that formalizes the MEV opportunity attribution problem and presents a framework to identify which on-chain transactions create these opportunities. They design and evaluate four attribution methods for atomic arbitrage on EVM-compatible networks: bot-data-driven, simulation-based, coefficient-based, and Shapley-based approaches.

Through large-scale retrospective analysis covering over one million blocks on Polygon, the team demonstrates that the majority of atomic arbitrage opportunities can be traced back to single source transactions, validating a central hypothesis about competitive MEV markets. They also quantify a highly concentrated distribution of MEV creation, where a small subset of protocols generates most opportunities. The comparative analysis reveals trade-offs between accuracy, cost, and scalability across the four methods. These findings offer actionable insights for protocol designers aiming to reduce MEV leakage, validators optimizing transaction ordering, and analysts measuring ecosystem health through opportunity creation patterns.