This talk suggests that Ethereum’s response to MEV (Daian et al. 2019) may be a contemporary case of what scholars call ‘private ordering’ (Ellickson 1991): a pseudonymous, digitally mediated and globally dispersed community (its ‘social layer’) mitigated a market failure affecting DeFi users without regulators, much as diamond dealers (Bernstein 1992), whalers (Ellickson 1989) and the Chicago Board of Trade (Lurie 1979) once did. Attendees will leave seeing MEV as a question of social norms and institutions as much as engineering, and Ethereum as a test of whether self-governance can scale beyond the physically-proximate close-knit communities scholars have traditionally studied.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will work through real Ethereum DeFi cases, from MEV exploitation and resolution attempts to DPRK-linked protocol abuse and potential responses, to explore how community norms and visions, including “Defipunk” as a normative aspiration, might become embedded in practice. They will leave with a broader understanding of the trade-offs and live debates shaping DeFi while contributing their insights to an Oxford doctoral research project (subject to consent).