Ethereum Foundation’s strategy chief lays out plan to kill MEV and make privacy a protocol default

Source Domain: cryptobriefing.com

The Ethereum Foundation is done treating maximum extractable value as an inconvenience. It now considers it a structural threat to the network’s neutrality, and it has a plan to act accordingly.

Bastian Aue, the EF’s Chief Strategy Advisor and interim co-Executive Director, published a six-part execution thread on June 22 laying out a sweeping operational pivot. The plan treats toxic MEV extraction as a fundamental problem to solve, elevates privacy to a default protocol feature, and shifts the foundation’s own compensation structure toward ETH and Ethereum-native stablecoins.

What the execution plan actually says

Aue’s thread is essentially a roadmap for turning the Ethereum Foundation into a more focused, more aligned organization. The six sections cover three major commitments that together represent a significant change in how the EF thinks about its role.

First, MEV. For the uninitiated: maximum extractable value is the profit that block producers and searchers can capture by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block. Some forms of MEV are relatively benign. Others, the “toxic” variety, directly harm regular users through front-running and sandwich attacks.

The EF’s new position is that these toxic forms of MEV aren’t just a user experience problem. They’re a threat to Ethereum’s credibility as neutral infrastructure. Aue’s plan calls for systemic solutions that reduce the ecosystem’s reliance on private order flow, which is currently the primary band-aid users apply to avoid getting sandwiched.

Second, privacy. The execution thread commits the EF to making privacy a default feature of the Ethereum protocol rather than something users have to opt into through third-party tools. This aligns with the foundation’s CROPS principles, an acronym covering censorship and capture resistance, open source development, privacy, and security.

Third, and perhaps most immediately tangible: the EF is…

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