This paper tackles the discovery of tMEV, that is, the Maximal Extractable Value on blockchains that arises from Token smart contracts. This scope differs from the existing MEV-discovery research, which analyzes application-layer contracts or attacker contracts, but ignores the wide and diverse range of token contracts. This paper presents a pipeline of techniques for tMEV discovery, including tSCAN, a static analysis tool for identifying non-standard supply-control functions in token contracts, and tSEARCH, a searcher that uncovers profitable tMEV opportunities by generating, refining, and solving token-specific constraints. By replaying real-world transactions, this paper demonstrates both the profitability of tMEV strategies and existing searchers' unawareness of them: the proposed tSEARCH extracts 10× more profit than observed MEV activity on Ethereum. The practicality of tMEV searching is demonstrated through a prototype built on Slither, showing high effectiveness with low performance overhead.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.07996,
title = {More to Extract: Discovering MEV by Token Contract Analysis},
author = {Jiaqi Chen and Yuzhe Tang and Yue Duan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.07996},
year = {2026}
}