2026-11-05 –, Lightning Stage
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.
MEV extraction on Ethereum has exceeded $1 billion since 2020. This predatory environment, ‘the dark forest’, is permitted by code and legally ambiguous, but has been widely recognised by the community as a market failure. Standard welfare-economic accounts treat such failures as grounds for state intervention. Yet Ethereum’s social layer developed private mechanisms, chiefly proposer-builder separation and MEV-protected routing, that now handle over 90% of transaction volume. The talk offers three arguments. First, self-governance emerged where its canonical preconditions are absent, in a dispersed, pseudonymous community. Second, the case continues a lineage of financial self-regulation, notably the Chicago Board of Trade, which made private rules against manipulation decades before federal law. Third, private ordering has limits: these mechanisms also concentrated block building and remain sensitive to state sanctions, suggesting private orders develop in 'the shadow of the state'.
Ekin Genc is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, focusing on DeFi and the law. He's the former editor-in-chief of DL News, the independent media arm of DefiLlama.