I haven’t posted in a while, mainly busy with a number of things, including the f(o)unding of @aori\_io. Now that the market’s resolved (way overdue), I thought I’d do an introspective writeup on the US presidential election prediction markets and detail some of the stuff I learnt and some of the strategies that I ran. I had to do a lot of learning as a non-US-citizen very new to US politics, so here details a lot of that research, combined with some knowledge. Of course, this is not financial advice.

MEV searchers are a class of actors in the crypto space that are driven by the incentive to capture opportunities on-chain. Some searchers can find opportunities at the cost of users to profit (e.g sandwiching) whilst others (known as keepers) contribute to the essential operating of a protocol, like liquidations. These opportunities are generally a winner-takes-all game and as such, there is a need to be extremely efficient, leveraging sophisticated techniques to outcompete others.

Latency is still a major principle in the world of MEV (Maximal Extractable Value). As block times get shorter on newer and newer chains, the blockchain emulates the first-come, first-served (FCFS) ordering system seen on off-chain centralized exchanges as searchers fail to keep up. Building low-latency systems for on-chain trading and arbitrage is a multi-faceted problem. However, likening it to traditional trading systems helps to understand each part.