With most of Ethereum’s activity offchain, the battle for MEV extraction is entering a new phase. In the last two weeks, Arbitrum’s Timeboost and Unichain’s Rollup Boost both went live, and we’re seeing the first test of opposing MEV capture philosophies on L2s. One of them centralizes value for protocol revenue; the other distributes it to applications.
Arbitrum launched TimeBoost, providing an express lane for searchers executing liquidation or arbitrage transactions, while other transactions are delayed by 200ms. Unichain on the other hand brings TEE based block-builder protecting users from harmful MEV and returning MEV back to apps. It does this by separating the roles of sequencer into a proposer and builder, just like on Ethereum and making the builder attest to the ordering rules.
Timeboost: Protocol First Value Capture
Arbitrum launched Timeboost on 17th April. Since its launch, it has quickly captured $160k in revenue from searcher bids. Though this is tiny compared to what apps like Pump.fun or Hyperliquid make at the same time, it made up 60% of Arbitrum’s revenue during the period. As competition between searchers intensifies and market matures, Arbitrum would make even higher revenue.
Before Timeboost, Arbitrum had generated $108M in total revenue. Its expenses on the other hand ballooned to over $226M. This has le
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