BITE Protocol: Actually Solving MEV

This piece is written by SKALE Co-founder/CTO, and inventor of BITE Protocol, Stan Kladko.

You ever try to play poker with your cards face-up? That’s what Ethereum does today. Let me explain.

When you send a transaction—like trading one token for another—it sits in this public waiting room called the mempool. Everyone can see it. What it’s doing, where it's going, how much is at stake. That includes people with fast computers and fancy algorithms. They look at your move, race ahead of you, and grab the opportunity before you can. This is called MEV—Maximal Extractable Value.

Now, most people said: “Well, that’s just how blockchains work.” But that’s not good enough. Not for us at SKALE.

So, we started thinking: What if you couldn’t see the transaction at all? What if it was scrambled—mathematically encrypted—so that nobody, not even a miner, could tell what it was until it was already locked into the chain?

And that’s exactly what BITE Protocol does.

Here’s how it works: You write your transaction like usual, but before sending it, you encrypt the important parts—who it’s going to, and what it wants to do. It still gets into a  block. But until the block is finalized—meaning no one can go back and change it—the data stays secret.

Then, a group of validators, using something called threshold encryption, collectively decrypt it. Only then does it run.

Boom. No one could front-run it. No one could censor it. And yet, it still works with regular Ethereum contracts. No changes needed. Magic? No—just math.

This isn’t some add-on. It’s baked right into the blockchain itself. Into the consensus. Into the way blocks are proposed, agreed on, and executed.

Now here’s the exciting part: once you have this encryption layer, you can do all sorts of neat things.

Private auctions. Hidden moves in games. Encrypted votes in DAOs. You can even build a bank—on-chain!—that stores balances encrypted and still lets you move money, earn interest, and take out loans, all without anyone seeing your data.

You can think of it like this: BITE makes blockchains not just transparent ledgers, but private cloud computers.

So, in short: we didn’t just patch MEV—we eliminated it. We didn’t just add privacy—we made it a first-class principle. And we did it all without asking developers to learn new tricks or rewrite their code.