MEV protection tokens have experienced hefty pump action in the past 48 hours, as news of the recent The Sevens smart contract exploit circled social media. Tokens like EDEN, ROOK, and MIST saw significant increases in pricing.
In the past 48 hours, EDEN hit its all-time high of $9.27, according to CoinGecko data. This was a quick jump from values seen on the day before The Sevens dropped, which circled around $5. Absolutely the same goes for MIST, which is also experiencing a significant spike in value. In the past two days, MIST spiked from $40 to more than $90 on September 9th. ROOK, the native token for KeeperDAO, also saw a hefty spike from $188 to $285.
Investors were drawn to MEV protection tokens, and they had good reason. The Sevens NFT collection is the main driver of this positive price action. The collection of 7000 unique NFTs launched on September 7th and had problems from the very start.
While a limiting mechanism was in place for the pre-launch, someone managed to mint 1000 NFTs in a matter of minutes. This sparked angry debates all over social media, and people started wondering how is this possible. To get the full picture, you can check out this detailed overview of the events that went down. The key point is – MEV had a big role to play in the drama.
What is MEV?
MEV is one of the most important concepts for the Ethereum blockchain. MEV stands for Miner Extractable Value and essentially represents the mechanism through which blockchain miners receive their mining rewards. Of course, an important note here is that mining rewards constitute the entire pool of gas fees users of the blockchain pay for their transactions to be validated. MEV allows miners to benefit from their position as an arbiter – in other words, miners decide which transactions make it into the current block, often based on the gas fees someone pays. Many people have referred to MEV as Ethereum’s invisible tax because it essentially represents the gas wars that happen when users want their transactions processed with priority.
MEV has caused a lot of headaches for NFT collectors and enthusiasts. Often, when a new collection drops, the wave of people minting and trying to record their transactions on the blockchain is huge. This, in turn, makes gas prices skyrocket because of MEV. Prioritizing transactions based on the highest amount of gas paid has often caused people to miss out on a mint and lose money on gas fees for failed transactions. This was largely the case with The Sevens as well.
What are MEV Protection tokens?
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton was right, as the same applies in the world of gas fees and priority transaction validation. EDEN, ROOK, and MIST are all MEV Protection tokens. Each of these three tokens has a variety of functions in their respective ecosystem. However, they all do the same in their essence, as they allow users to somewhat circumvent the MEV mechanism on Ethereum.
Let’s take EDEN as an example. According to the official website, Eden is a priority transaction network that protects traders from frontrunning, aligns incentives for block producers, and redistributes miner extractable value. This means that EDEN holders who stake their tokens can benefit from priority transaction processing.
In essence, that’s how the wallet mentioned above managed to surpass the limiter set up by the Sevens developers and mint 1000 NFTs, while other users were fighting who would offer the most in gas fees. Because the wallet had enough MEV protection tokens staked, his transactions took priority, while his gas fees remained low. Additionally, networks like Eden allow for transaction bundle processing, meaning that whole blocks of transactions can be processed simultaneously.
Essentially, Eden works like a non-consensus-breaking transaction ordering protocol for Ethereum blocks. It allows network participants to guarantee placement and protection from arbitrary reordering, which happens during gas wars.
You can see how handy such a tool comes in use when a desirable NFT collection drops. If your transactions are prioritized, and you have the added security that gas fees won’t skyrocket, your chances of successfully minting an NFT increase, despite the overload on the smart contracts.
Prices pumping
Following the drama that The Sevens went through, Twitter and Discord exploded with questions. How could this happen? How is this possible? Answers started coming in quickly from experienced devs in the community, and information about MEV protection tokens started spreading.
Following the increased attention on social media, more investors started purchasing such tokens. Consequently, the price went up. A very classic case of supply and demand price movement.
If you’re curious to explore the capabilities of MEV tokens, you can easily get some through the handy DappRadar Token Swap. Check out the links below:
The above does not constitute investment advice. The information given here is purely for informational purposes only. Please exercise due diligence and do your research.
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