How Does Miner Extractable Value (MEV) Relate to Front-Running in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)?

MEV is the profit a block producer (miner or validator) can extract by including, excluding, or reordering transactions within a block. Front-running is a common form of MEV where a bot sees a large pending transaction and places its own order just before it to profit from the price change the large transaction will cause.

This is often done by paying a higher gas fee to ensure their transaction is processed first. Solutions like Flashbots aim to mitigate this by creating a private communication channel between users and miners, bypassing the public mempool.