Leader Extractable Value (LEV)

[techcoderx]

A variant of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) that could be extracted from curators voting on potentially underrated contents. Leaders involved in LEV activities would insert their own votes of the same direction into their own blocks (bypassing the mempool) when an incoming vote operation is observed such that the LEV votes will execute before the curator's vote does.

This takes advantage of the vote ordering that is being used to determine curation rewards as votes that it favours votes executed earlier. In this instance the curator is still under an impression that the content being voted on is underrated as the curator does not see the LEV votes that are being executed before the curator's vote resulting in lower rewards for the curator and higher rewards for the LEV votes.

There is a risk in LEV such that the content could be voted in the opposite direction afterwards, reducing rewards for LEV votes. In the case of the LEV vote being an upvote however, this is not a good mitigation as the later downvotes would directly affect rewards of author vote and any author tips unnecessarily. There is no guarantee that the downvoters would be nice to downvote with author tip.

Mitigation: Instead of benefiting all previous active votes for every new incoming vote, group the votes by the age of the content when the vote was made (such as 0-24 hours, 25-72 hours, 72-168 hours and 169 hours onwards). All votes in a group benefit from votes in the later groups equally. This retains the advantage of voting before others do while making LEV more difficult. It may also come with an added benefit of keeping the curation reward distribution easier to understand for the average user.