MEV means blockchain operators earn extra profit by previewing or reordering transactions before they are written to the network. This situation can be compared to the “front-running” practice seen in traditional financial markets.

MEV causes significant problems in the Ethereum network. It negatively impacts user experience by increasing transaction fees for users, slowing down transaction speeds, and even causing transactions to fail in certain cases.

Jason Linehan, Director of the Private Mechanisms Group at Consensys, the company behind MetaMask, highlights the scale of this problem, saying: “Every year, $400 million is wasted through canceled transactions, stuck transactions, and outright theft MEV pre-orders and sandwich attacks. ” “Everyone agrees this is a big problem. It doesn’t make sense for users to pay for a transaction that serves no purpose,” Linehan said. says.

MetaMask takes a new approach to the traditional “mempool” concept to solve this problem. A mempool is a pool of pending transactions, and transactions queue in this pool before being written to the network. MetaMask’s new feature, the “virtual pool”, works similar to the traditional mempool, but has some key differences.

When users enable the Smart Transactions feature, they send transactions to MetaMask’s virtual pool before they are officially written to the Ethereum blockchain. The virtual pool then runs transaction simulations in the background to optimize transaction fees and help protect against MEV attacks.

MetaMask claims that the virtual pool will provide two main benefits for users: lower transaction fees and faster transaction confirmations. The virtual pool can save users time and money by running simulations to optimize transaction fees. It can also reduce the risk of transaction failure by helping to protect against MEV attacks.

However, a virtual pool also has some potential disadvantages. Some users may be concerned about decentralization because their transactions go through MetaMask’s virtual pool. In traditional mempool, transactions are sent directly to the network, while in virtual pool, transactions are processed by MetaMask. This means MetaMask could potentially censor or delay transactions.

Consensys tries to address these concerns, emphasizing that the virtual pool only serves to optimize transaction fees and protect against MEV attacks, and that there is no such thing as censoring transactions.

MetaMask’s Smart Transactions feature could be an important step towards addressing transaction fees and MEV issues on the Ethereum network. This feature can make Ethereum more useful by improving users’ trading experience.

However, it is not yet known how the virtual pool will function in the long term and how it will affect the centralization of the Ethereum network. Whether users will adopt this new feature and whether more permanent solutions to the MEV problem can be found are issues that need to be closely monitored in the coming period.