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The Impossibility of Perfect Fairness in Transaction Ordering

The Cointelegraph β€‹

Cryptocoins News / The Cointelegraph β€‹ 15 Views

Why perfect fairness cannot hold in asynchronous networks, and how different blockchains adopt different relaxations to fairness.

Consensus guarantees today, focus on two properties: Consistency and Liveness. Consistency requires that all nodes eventually agree on the same set and sequence of transactions, while liveness ensures the system continues to process new transactions. What they do not address is whether the agreed-upon transaction order totally reflects fairness.

In public blockchains, transaction ordering has direct economic consequences. The order in which transactions execute determines who captures value and who pays the cost, particularly as validators, block builders, or sequencers can exploit their privileged role in block construction for financial gain. This practice is known as maximal extractable value (MEV) and includes the profitable frontrunning, backrunning, and sandwiching of transactions. Prima facie, there is no obvious way to prevent MEV extracting practices because block proposers hold unilateral power over transaction ordering, and no protocol rule inherently constrains how they exercise that power.

To address this, transaction order-fairness has been proposed as a third essential consensus property. A protocol is transaction order-fair if no participant can systematically bias transaction ordering beyond what objective network conditions and protocol rules imply. By limiting how much power a block proposer has to reorder transactions, fair-ordering protocols move blockchains closer to being transparent, predictable, and MEV-resistant.

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