If a traditional bank were exploiting your transactions to make profits off you, you’d never tolerate it. But that’s exactly what’s happening on the Ethereum network. Users’ transactions are being leveraged to extract profits. Put simply, Ethereum validators are desperate to squeeze profit out of your transactions. In just the past 24 hours, builders have made 137.1 ETH, roughly $480,000. Validators are supposed to serve as guardians of Ethereum’s integrity and consensus, but through builders and relays, they openly earn additional profits from MEV. Here’s a real example: a user swapped $220,764 USDC for USDT on Uniswap v3, but only received $5,271 USDT in return. It wasn’t through the official interface, but it shows the lurking danger within Ethereum’s current design. Builders scan pending transactions in the mempool, reorder or insert their own, and profit from front-running and sandwich attacks. That’s how they systematically extract value directly from users. Right now, the top 3 builders control 91.07 % of all block production, meaning MEV profits are being taken from almost every transaction on the network. Frankly, I find this absurd. In traditional finance, such behavior would be outright illegal, yet in crypto it’s somehow considered a “normal” source of extra yield. Things that would be unthinkable in banking are happening here in plain sight. On the other hand, in the eUTXO model, each transaction is fully deterministic and isolated, meaning they cannot be reordered or manipulated by validators. This makes it practically impossible to exploit users’ transactions for profit. Ethereum may be the current standard, but most people don’t realize there’s an alternative design that avoids this structural flaw altogether. If we’re truly looking for a global financial network for everyone, it should be one where transactions are safe, and where no one can prey on your profits. That’s one of the many reasons why Cardano stands out as a genuinely promising network. (source: rated network)