A Simple Characterization of MEV

In the last few years, the notion of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) from a transaction in Ethereum has received much attention. Value from a transaction can be extracted in different ways. Yet, despite the wide interest generated by the topic and the variety of extraction strategies adopted, so far there seem to be only very few contributions trying to formalize the notion of MEV. This would be useful to investigate its main features, for a more complete description and a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Based on the properties of its fundamental elements, that we define in the work, this paper presents a simple characterization of MEV.