Full MEV Protection: How UniversalX Protects Your Profits

Just because you don’t hear much about MEV these days, it doesn’t mean it’s gone.

In October 2024 alone, MEV extracted almost $80M from Solana users. This problem is also rampant for EVM chains (with some, like BNB Chain, forced to take steps against it). This, in combination with recent events—like the Pump.fun and Libra drama—has made it clear that it’s the least informed traders that get taken advantage of by professionals when it comes to degen activity.

As we crafted UniversalX, we realized that, to make a great product, chain abstraction is only the first step. The rest is all about serving users’ needs—and a serious one, whether they realize it or not, to fully protect them from MEV. As such, we chose to incorporate a way to deal with MEV across different networks and ecosystems. 

Here’s how it works.

But bro, what’s MEV?

MEV stands for Maximal Extractable Value. It represents the maximum value that a blockchain block producer can extract by changing the order of transactions, inserting their own transactions, or excluding others within a block​. 

In simpler terms, if someone (typically a bot) controlling a block notices a profitable opportunity in the pending transactions, they might reorder them and insert their own to make a profit. This is typically done by:

1. Front-running: Taking advantage of a trading opportunity before the user, leaving them to miss it altogether. E.g. if you want to buy $TOKEN at $0.2, the sniper might purchase before you, moving the price and making you buy at a worse rate.
2. Sandwiching: Inserting sales and purchases before and after your transaction. In the above scenario, this might mean purchasing at $0.2, moving the price, and selling to you at a worse rate to pocket the difference.

Furthermore, competition among MEV bots can drive up gas fees for everyone, as bots are willing to pay high fees (tips) to get priority inclusion. In fact, bidding wars have been known to raise transaction costs across entire networks​.

For Solana trades, on the other hand, UniversalX has optional, dynamic protection. This can be toggled by a user in their trading settings:

This MEV protection works by attaching a tip (decided by users) for validators to Solana transactions, incentivizing them to include the trade promptly and without reordering. This extra step makes it much harder for any would-be attacker to profit by reordering transactions. 

Solana anti-MEV protection is especially recommended for large-value trades, where stakes are higher. For smaller trades, Solana’s default behavior already offers some baseline protection, but having the ability to add MEV protection gives traders peace of mind when it matters most.

Conclusion

By integrating MEV protection into UniversalX, we want to ensure that UniversalX traders are maximally profitable on every chain, realizing the potential of chain abstraction. 

This is true to our goal of delivering a CEX-like trading experience entirely on-chain​… 

…and to what Web3’s goal ultimate should be: competing hand-in-hand with centralized products.

About Particle Network

Particle Network powers chain abstraction, addressing Web3's fragmentation of users and liquidity. This is enabled by Particle's Universal Accounts, which give users a unified account and balance across all chains.

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