Value Capture Shifts
This lens is for systems that change who gets paid when a protocol creates scarce timing, routing, liquidation, sequencing, or data-delivery advantages.
Questions worth asking:
- What economic rent used to belong to miners, validators, relayers, market makers, or liquidators, and who captures it now?
- Does the system turn an implicit race into an explicit auction, router default, proxy layer, or payout rule?
- Who sets the revenue split, bidder access, fallback path, or eligibility rules?
- Does the shift reduce deadweight loss, or just move dependence to a new operator, committee, or middleware chokepoint?
Good comparison set
- Private or protocol-side orderflow auctions: flashbots-auction, express-relay, timeboost, and api3-oev
- Oracle and pricing middleware where delivery or adapter policy changes who monetizes information flow: api3, chainlink-data-streams, euler-price-oracle, and compound-open-price-feed
- Credit and liquidation systems where spread capture or backstop positioning matters: aave, morpho, b-protocol, and llamma