On Thursday, Flare published a governance proposal that would make it a pioneer among layer-1 blockchains in capturing maximal extractable value (MEV) at the protocol level. This move would prevent MEV from being controlled by a small group of specialized actors who currently profit from transaction ordering across major chains. MEV refers to the revenue generated by block builders through reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block.
Typically, this value is captured by external searchers and builders, resulting in a hidden tax on ordinary users through front-running, sandwich attacks, and arbitrage. Estimates suggest that annual MEV revenues range from tens of millions on networks like Arbitrum to $500 million on Ethereum and $1 billion on Solana. Flare's proposal involves a three-stage process to redirect MEV revenue into the protocol's token economics. The first stage involves transferring block building from individual validators to a designated builder operated by the Flare Entity, with a fallback to the current model if the builder is unavailable.
The second stage moves block building to Flare Confidential Compute, making the process publicly auditable. The third stage merges the builder and proposer into a single entity, shifting existing validators to a verification role. The proposal also introduces FIRE, the Flare Income Reinvestment Entity, which would collect revenue from various protocol sources, including attestation fees, FAsset and Smart Account fees, confidential compute fees, and captured MEV.
FIRE's primary objective is to reduce the FLR token supply through open-market buybacks and burns. Upon approval, several changes would take effect immediately. The annual FLR inflation rate would decrease to 3% from 5%, and the hard cap would be reduced to 3 billion tokens per year from 5 billion.
A 20-fold increase in the base gas fee, from 60 gwei to 1,200 gwei, would raise the estimated annual FLR burn from approximately 7.5 million to 300 million at current transaction volumes. Even with the increase, a standard Flare transaction would cost only a fraction of a cent. Flare has strong ties to the XRP ecosystem, having distributed its initial token supply through an airdrop to XRP holders in 2023.
Its FAssets system has produced over 150 million FXRP and is designed to bring smart contract functionality to assets on blockchains like XRPL that do not natively support it. As of late March 2026, the network reports over $160 million in total value locked and more than 887,000 active addresses.