  Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) drives the prosperity of the blockchain
ecosystem. By strategically including, excluding, or reordering transactions
within blocks, block producers/validators can extract additional value, which
in turn incentivizes them to keep the decentralization of the whole blockchain
platform. Before The Merge of Ethereum in Sep. 2022, around \$675M was
extracted in terms of MEV. Despite its importance, current measurement works on
MEV suffer some limitations. First, current works only focus on transactions of
a very limited number of DApps. Second, current methods heavily rely on fixed
heuristic rule-based patterns, leading to false negative/positive. Third, the
observations and conclusions are outdated to some extent due to the
continuously introduced features, like The Merge in Ethereum. To address these
challenges, in this work, we first propose two robust methods to identify
arbitrage transactions and sandwich attacks, respectively. Then, we apply them
to the largest-ever dataset to filter out related MEV transactions. Based on
the identified results, we have characterized the overall landscape of the
Ethereum MEV ecosystem, the impact the private transaction architectures bring,
and the adoption of back-running mechanism. Our research will shed light on
future MEV-related work.
