Searching for Alpha: Leaderless Auctions

Decentralized on-chain auctions have a “last look problem” where someone has an unfair informational advantage by having the option to act last after viewing all other bids. This is a form of MEV where the block proposer can censor all bids and bid low themselves (for single-block auctions) or marginally overbid at the last block before the auction deadline (for multi-block auctions).

Paradigm proposes a new form of decentralized auctions with no auctioneers called “leaderless auctions” that aims to mitigate this issue.