Towards Quantifying Cross-Domain Maximal Extractable Value for Blockchain Decentralisation

In the research society, many solutions to solving blockchain scaling have been tried historically, usually by compromising on decentralisation. Ethereum has chosen to scale by switching to Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus and adding data sharding to allow Layer 2 execution to be cheaper. However, in the light of cross-domain Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), even this strategy may have centralising forces built-in. In this work, we focus on cross domain MEV and try to identify cross domain arbitrage. We achieve this by extracting Uniswap data from four different domains and analysing the dataset with two different methods. Based on the analysis, we are successful in identifying one smart contract’s address, which is deployed to multiple domains, engaging in cross domain arbitrage. We also illustrate the difficulties when quantifying cross-domain MEV in practice.