Financial freedom means stopping crypto MEV attacks — Shutter Network contributor

Cryptocurrency was created to be a neutral, fair and equitable financial technology to empower regular people to transact freely anywhere, at any time and with anyone. However, much of crypto can hardly be considered fair for the average user in 2025, according to Shutter Network core contributor Loring Harkness.Harkness says maximum extractable value (MEV) bots, whale decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) voters and others have made crypto a place where the average user feels less secure and empowered than they should — but that there is a simple solution to several of these issues.On Episode 14 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond chat with Harkness about fairness in crypto, how the Shutter Network uses encryption to safeguard users, and why enabling free and fair transactions has global geopolitical implications for activists and those living under authoritarian regimes.Crypto isn’t fair when MEV bots steal your moneyHarkness described Shutter as “a platform which helps your favorite platforms be more fair, credibly neutral and private.” It does this by encrypting data such as transactions or DAO votes until a certain threshold is reached, such as when a transaction has been confirmed or a DAO voting period has ended, ensuring that MEV bots can’t steal from users and whales can’t manipulate voter sentiment.MEV attacks have plagued the crypto space, particularly decentralized finance. At least 526,207 Ether (ETH), worth around $1.3 billion, was extracted from Ethereum between September 2022 and June 2024 alone, and one notorious Solana-based bot captured $30 million over just two months in 2024.“By encrypting that transaction before it goes into the mempool, [...] these MEV bots are blind,” Harkness said. “Because they can see there’s a transaction, but they don’t know the contents of the transaction, they’re not able to manipulate it, and so they can’t place their transactions strategically before or before and after that transaction.”“As a result, it protects normal blockchain users, people like you and me, from malicious MEV and from this form of organized theft, which has become pervasive on Ethereum.”Crypto as a tool for fairness and freedom during crisisBefore working on Shutter, Harkness had been living in Myanmar and building alternative finance mechanisms when the country’s military seized power in a 2021 coup and began seizing the assets of dissidents — a powerful real-world example of the importance of financial fairness and freedom.The new military government cracked down on protests and began “a process of weaponizing the TradFi banking system,” Harkness told The Agenda. “The Myanmar military used the banking system in order to identify pro-democracy actors and, in some cases, seize their assets and, in other cases, imprison them. He said crypto offered a lifeline, allowing residents to maintain the value of their savings through stablecoins as the currency became volatile, while others converted their funds into crypto in order to move it out of the traditional banking system, where it was at risk of government seizure.“With self-sovereignty of digital assets, they were able to basically move their money out of Myanmar and onchain, even though they themselves physically were still in the country. And it gave them a protection against the arbitrary seizure of assets by the military.”To hear more from Harkness’ conversation with The Agenda — including more on how threshold encryption on Shutter Network works and whether crypto has lost its cypherpunk roots — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows! This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.