More to Extract: Discovering MEV by Token Contract Analysis

2026-03-09

AI Summary

Existing research on Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has largely overlooked token-based MEV (tMEV) opportunities arising from token smart contracts, leaving numerous high-profit scenarios unexplored. This work addresses this gap by focusing on the token contract level and introducing a novel tMEV discovery framework. The framework employs a static analysis tool, tSCAN, to identify non-standard supply control functions, and integrates symbolic execution with constraint solving to develop tSEARCH, which automatically generates profitable tMEV strategies. Empirical evaluation through replaying real Ethereum transactions demonstrates that tSEARCH achieves profits an order of magnitude higher—up to ten times—than those of current MEV practices, thereby validating both the substantial profitability of tMEV and the efficiency and low overhead of the proposed methodology.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Security and Privacy: Cryptocurrency and smart contracts
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Topic discovery and tracking

Abstract

This paper tackles the discovery of tMEV, that is, the Maximal Extractable Value on blockchains that arises from Token smart contracts. This scope differs from the existing MEV-discovery research, which analyzes application-layer contracts or attacker contracts, but ignores the wide and diverse range of token contracts. This paper presents a pipeline of techniques for tMEV discovery, including tSCAN, a static analysis tool for identifying non-standard supply-control functions in token contracts, and tSEARCH, a searcher that uncovers profitable tMEV opportunities by generating, refining, and solving token-specific constraints. By replaying real-world transactions, this paper demonstrates both the profitability of tMEV strategies and existing searchers'unawareness of them: the proposed tSEARCH extracts $10\times$ more profit than observed MEV activity on Ethereum. The practicality of tMEV searching is demonstrated through a prototype built on Slither, showing high effectiveness with low performance overhead.

Problem

• MEV
• token contracts
• tMEV
• blockchain
• smart contracts

Innovation

• tMEV
• token contract analysis
• static analysis
• constraint solving
• MEV discovery