This quarter, private transactions—meaning transactions that bypassed the public mempool—made up 9.6% of all smart contract transactions on Ethereum. That’s nearly 1 out of every 10 transactions!
This is more than a 2x increase from last quarter where only ~4.5% of transactions were "private". Private transactions are typically linked to MEV bundles, OFAs, or some other sources of private order flow.
To identify the source of this increase in private transaction landing on-chain, we took a deeper dive into the data and found that 45% of the private transactions in May and June were sent through MEV Blocker, indicating that the use of Order Flow Auctions (OFAs) for MEV Protection and value recirculation are on the rise.
NOTE: In this dataset, we define “private” transactions as transactions not seen by our mempool archive. We have also excluded any private transactions related to builder payments (payments to the validator at the end of the block).
Mempools are local to each node. While we have a constellation of detector nodes, it's not guaranteed that we see EVERY public transaction. A transaction could be public but if our archive didn’t see it then it was marked “private” However, this would represent a very small minority of cases.
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