Bittensor MEV Shield Goes Live

Onchain markets are an exploitation playground due to the lack of privacy associated with public mempools. When pending transactions are visible to everyone before execution, they create opportunities for maximal extractable value (MEV): strategies where bots and validators profit by front-running, back-running, or reordering transactions.

It's so pervasive that entire categories of applications, investment strategies, and institutional workflows remain offchain, as they would be exploited the moment they touched the network. As a result, vast amounts of capital stay sidelined, unwilling to enter an environment where transparency equates to vulnerability. On some blockchains, specialized bots extract millions of dollars per month by reordering or inserting transactions, and in extreme cases, consume more than half of a network’s resources simply competing with one another. That activity redirects value away from users and increases transaction costs across the system.

It's a mess.

To combat this, today @opentensor announced the launch of MEV Shield, an encrypted mempool protection feature now live on Bittensor.

The shield protects transactions from MEV attacks by encrypting transaction data while it resides in the mempool. Transaction details, including intent and slippage, remain hidden until block inclusion, preventing front-running and sandwich attacks that depend on advance visibility.

The data is encrypted using a public key provided by the blockchain validator and is only decrypted immediately before finalization, closing the window in which MEV strategies typically operate. This ensures that value generated by the network remains with the network itself rather than being siphoned off by automated trading infrastructure.

MEV Shield is integrated into Bittensor’s official tooling. Both the command-line interface (BTCLI) and the Python SDK enable MEV protection by default for operations considered more vulnerable to exploitation, such as staking, subnet creation, and proxy execution. These transactions are submitted through a dedicated mevShield::submit_encrypted() extrinsic. Users and developers can disable the protection for specific use cases, such as high-speed scripts, by adding a --no-mev-protection flag or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The feature is optional and context-aware. MEV Shield is not intended for use with hotkey-signed extrinsics, and attempts to do so will fail. The documentation cautions against holding TAO on hotkeys to bypass this restriction, noting that such configurations are untested and could lead to unintended consequences, including asset loss.

Learn More: https://docs.learnbittensor.org/concepts/mev-shield

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