MEV Resistance by Design
MEV Resistance by Design
SnarkSide was not designed to mitigate MEV. It was designed to make MEV impossible.
Rather than patching around the edges of front-running, sandwiching, or liquidation sniping, SnarkSide rethinks execution entirely—using zero-knowledge proofs, encrypted intents, and off-chain matching layers to eliminate the structural weaknesses that make MEV profitable in the first place.
This section breaks down the core architectural decisions that ensure SnarkSide’s immunity to MEV is not reactive, but proactive and systemic.
1. No Observable Mempool
In traditional DEXs—whether AMM-based, orderbook, or intent-driven—trades are often broadcast to the public mempool, even before inclusion. This pre-confirmation visibility allows searchers to:
Front-run large orders
Back-run slippage-sensitive trades
Target known liquidation thresholds
SnarkSide exposes no mempool. Intents are encrypted client-side and relayed through a peer-selected MPC mesh or through stealth delivery channels. There is no pre-state exposure, and no way for an external observer to reconstruct the market pressure from pending flows.
2. Encrypted Trade Intents
Every trade on SnarkSide is an intent, not a transaction. And every intent is:
Locally signed
Poseidon-hashed and salted
Bound to a nonce and nullifier
Submitted off-chain, not to a mempool
These intents are never decrypted or matched on-chain. They’re consumed by relayers and matched off-chain in zero-knowledge, ensuring that:
No price level, size, or leverage is leaked
No transaction ordering exists to exploit
No correlation can be drawn from vault state
There’s nothing to sandwich, frontrun, or tail.
3. Private Liquidation Triggers
Liquidation attacks are one of the most profitable forms of on-chain MEV—especially in perp DEXs. SnarkSide’s CipherVault model prevents this in two ways:
Vault states are shielded—no one can see your margin level or liquidation threshold
Liquidation proofs are ZK-submitted, requiring no address exposure
This means no one—not even large adversaries—can target your liquidation point. Liquidators must prove insolvency cryptographically, without wallet disclosure or vault tracing.
This breaks the game-theoretic incentives for MEV bots to manipulate price or gas to induce forced liquidations.
4. Matching Off-Chain, Verifying On-Chain
Matching is where most MEV enters the system.
In a traditional DEX:
Orders are sequenced on-chain
The first to post determines execution
Searchers can reorder, simulate, or replicate
In SnarkSide:
Intents are matched by off-chain relayers
The only on-chain action is a SNARK proof of valid matching
No trade details are revealed—even post-settlement
Because of this, SnarkSide does not require:
Cancellations
Limit orders
Execution windows
Instead, it operates on cryptographic constraint satisfaction: if your intent matches another, and all vaults are valid, the system accepts it—no front of line, no reordering.
5. Fee Abstraction and Stealth Tips
Fee signals are another leakage point in DEX environments. Gas priority fees, bribes, and tip mechanics all offer MEV bots surface area for inference.
SnarkSide uses fee abstraction via its native token $SNSD:
Fees are committed in private via shielded vaults
Relayers prioritize intents via embedded ZK tips, not public gas wars
There is no advantage to broadcasting a high fee—relayers don’t leak that data
This removes the classic “gas auction” vector from the execution layer entirely.
6. Rollup-Friendly Batch Settlement
Each batch of matched trades is posted as:
A ZK proof
A Merkle root
A nullifier list
No events. No decoded trades. No addresses. No prices. SnarkSide appears on-chain as a series of state transitions without state visibility.
Searchers scanning Ethereum or L2 blockspace will find nothing exploitable—no pending liquidation, no high-slippage trade, no whale exposure, no momentum trigger.
7. Intent Obfuscation as a Primitive
Instead of merely protecting data, SnarkSide treats intent obfuscation as a protocol primitive:
All trade directionality is hidden
All sizing is committed, not declared
Even the fact that a trade exists is concealed unless matched
This ensures that market impact is nonlinear and unpredictable. Observing the chain cannot give any alpha on future movement because the mechanism itself is opaque.
Summary: No Attack Surface
Mempool Sniping
No mempool; off-chain encrypted intents
Sandwich Attacks
No price visibility; no token transfer exposure
Liquidation Front-run
Vaults shielded; liquidation requires ZK proof
Gas Auctions
Fee abstraction via $SNSD; no gas priority ordering
Orderbook Dragging
No orderbook; matching via constraint satisfaction
Backrun Extraction
No event logs; post-trade state is opaque
MEV assumes visibility. SnarkSide eliminates it.
This is not just “private DeFi.” It is cryptographically enforced market neutrality—an execution layer that can’t be gamed because there is nothing visible to game.
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