  Blockchains offer strong security gurarantees, but cannot protect users
against the ordering of transactions. Players such as miners, bots and
validators can reorder various transactions and reap significant profits,
called the Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). In this paper, we propose an MEV
aware protocol design called Masquerade, and show that it will increase user
satisfaction and confidence in the system. We propose a strict per-transaction
level of ordering to ensure that a transaction is committed either way even if
it is revealed. In this protocol, we introduce the notion of a "token" to
mitigate the actions taken by an adversary in an attack scenario. Such tokens
can be purchased voluntarily by users, who can then choose to include the token
numbers in their transactions. If the users include the token in their
transactions, then our protocol requires the block-builder to order the
transactions strictly according to token numbers. We show through extensive
simulations that this reduces the probability that the adversaries can benefit
from MEV transactions as compared to existing current practices.
