Signals and Spoils: Speculative Oracle Extractable Value in the Era of Cross-Chain Interoperability
2026-06-02 • Cryptography and Security
Cryptography and Security
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study a new way people make money from transactions called speculative MEV on Layer-2 blockchains, which involves sending many similar transactions to get paid first. They focus on speculative OEV, which happens when people try to quickly liquidate risky loans by reacting to price updates from oracles. By looking at three Layer-2 networks, the authors found many such speculative liquidations. They also discovered that delays in price updates across different blockchains can be predicted and exploited for extra profit, showing that price updates on one chain can help predict updates on others, enabling cross-chain opportunistic trading.
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)Layer-2 blockchainspublic mempoolspeculative MEVOracle Extractable Value (OEV)liquidationsChainlink Decentralized Oracle Network (DON)price oraclescross-chain arbitrageAave
Authors
Hasret Ozan Sevim, Christof Ferreira Torres
Abstract
A new form of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), termed speculative MEV, has emerged across Layer-2 blockchains. Unlike Ethereum mainnet, many Layer-2 systems lack a public mempool, forcing extraction strategies to become probabilistic: searchers emit multiple identical transactions hoping to capture an opportunity first. This generates substantial transaction spam, increasing fees and wasting block space. We investigate speculative Oracle Extractable Value (OEV), a form of MEV associated with liquidating undercollateralized loans via speculative backrunning of oracle price updates. We propose a methodology for detecting speculative liquidations in the wild and apply it across Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism. On October 10, 2025, we identify 64 speculative liquidators on Aave (57% of all detected liquidators) and 831 successful speculative liquidations (39% of all successful liquidations across the three chains). We further examine whether latency differences in oracle price feed updates across blockchains can be exploited for cross-chain OEV. Specifically, we ask whether a searcher can observe oracle updates on one chain and frontrun liquidation opportunities on another. We systematically analyze Chainlink Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) configurations (deviation thresholds, heartbeat intervals, and submitted price observations) across Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, and Optimism. Our dataset comprises 63 Chainlink feeds, 12,009 price updates, and over 100,000 oracle observations linked to 2,986 Aave liquidations. We show that independent DONs consume largely identical off-chain price data nearly simultaneously yet publish updates at different times, creating statistically predictable cross-chain exploitation windows. We demonstrate that Chainlink updates on Optimism can predict subsequent updates on Arbitrum and Base, enabling speculative cross-chain OEV extraction.