I always wanted to study MEV since I first read about it. If you have been in crypto for a while, it is very likely that you have heard about maximum extractable value or MEV. There are users making big money through MEV bots. But to us, mere mortals, it seems so unreachable. My love of challenges and passion of blockchain are what made me study and, if I’m lucky enough, to benefit from MEV.
But first things first. What is the maximum extractable value? Who is the value extracted from? What is value anyway? Though there can be many definitions, I will go with one I like most and which, I think, clarifies the concept best of all. Maximum extractable value, or MEV is any action on blockchain which has a positive expected value.
In this piece I will write about my progress. To be honest, I don’t think that it is easy to benefit from MEV against others, those who have been in the field for many years. They have designed best, smartest bots and optimize their performance regularly. My first goal is to learn many things along the way, such as reading data from blockchain, read the code of other bots and learn from them, and improve my Solidity and, in general, programming skills. To make money from MEV can only be a by-product of this noble and challenging task. I will describe all my small accomplishment and failures because writing will keep me accountable, I believe.
So, an initial draft of list of actions looks like this:
- Read more about what MEV is, how people exploit inefficiencies on-chain, and the terminology and jargon of the field. This is not a technical, but mostly “popular science” approach to maximum extractable value.
- Go through the tweet by BowtiedDevil below.
- https://twitter.com/BowTiedDevil/status/1573519590373883904
- Learn to read data from blockchain; connect to RPC and make RPC requests. Play with different methods Web3 libraries, such as Alchemy, provide.
- Study Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) in depth from the resource below. It seems wonderful and contains many good articles on EVM. The knowledge of EVM is necessary to be successful at EVM.
The list will be updated regularly.
