DEX MEV in Closed Form (Sandwich Attacks)

📢 Upcoming IEEE Blockchain Austria Meetup
🗓 Wednesday, May 6th, 2026
🕕 18:00–20:00 CET
📍 WU Wien (Room TBA – ExAC or D2)
🎙 Mark Richardson (Project Lead, Bancor Protocol)

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🔍 Topic: DEX MEV in Closed Form (Sandwich Attacks)

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We’re pleased to host Mark Richardson, Project Lead at Bancor Protocol. Mark holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and transitioned from research science into DeFi in 2021. At Bancor, he has been leading the development of Carbon DeFi, a system enabling strategy-specific liquidity provision and more expressive market participation. His work focuses on combining rigorous quantitative methods with practical protocol design, while maintaining decentralization, user safety, and simplicity.

This talk provides an analytical and algebraic examination of Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Maximal Extracted Value (MEV), focusing specifically on the sandwich attack mechanism. Mark derives the closed-form solution for computing the optimal, profit-maximizing sandwich attack in the prototypical x*y=k AMM. The variables, constraints, and the objective function that an MEV searcher must solve when exploiting a pending DEX trade by a naive user are explicitly defined and elaborated. Specifically, the talk provides the details for calculating exact, optimal front-run and back-run trade sizes, illustrated by numeric examples. This rigorous, quantitative work is essential for designing and evaluating future mechanisms aimed at mitigating or redistributing MEV in blockchain economies.

The seminar is aimed at researchers and practitioners interested in mechanism design, applied cryptography, market engineering, DeFi, AMMs, and applied cryptoeconomics