MEV Doesn’t Disappear. It Changes Form Across Market Structures
Jascha Samadi argues that the right question is not whether a market has MEV, but who controls the pricing power over transaction ordering. In his framing, ordering value behaves like conserved energy: whenever a ledger processes valuable shared state in sequence, execution order carries economic value. That value can be auctioned, hidden, burned, or renamed, but it does not vanish.
The article compares four settings. Ethereum turns ordering value into a visible market through searchers, builders, relays, validators, and proposer-builder separation. Canton removes the public market around ordering, but not the discretion itself, shifting it toward synchronizer operators within a permissioned and privacy-heavy architecture. Traditional finance, in Samadi’s view, spent decades burying the same rent inside payment for order flow, dark pools, and last look, with enforcement records exposing how hidden ordering advantages were monetized over time. Hyperliquid, by contrast, is presented as a case that formalizes execution priority through public auctions and then burns the fees, pushing the proceeds into a public pool rather than private bilateral arrangements.
His conclusion is narrow but sharp: every venue that orders valuable state transitions produces ordering value. The real distinction between systems is whether that value is openly priced, who captures it, and whether the resulting rents are observable and redistributed or quietly absorbed by whoever sits closest to the sequencer.
