On Thursday, Flare published a governance proposal that would enable the blockchain to capture maximal extractable value at the protocol level, a first among layer-1 blockchains. This move would redirect revenue from specialized actors who currently profit from transaction ordering.

MEV refers to the revenue generated by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions within a block, effectively imposing a hidden tax on users through front-running, sandwich attacks, and arbitrage. External estimates suggest that MEV revenues reach tens of millions on networks like Arbitrum, over $500 million on Ethereum, and up to $1 billion on Solana. The proposed three-stage plan would integrate this revenue into Flare's token economics. The first stage involves transferring block building from individual validators to a designated entity, initially managed by the Flare Entity, with a fallback to the current model if needed.

The second stage makes block building publicly auditable through Flare Confidential Compute. In the third stage, the builder and proposer are merged, shifting validators to a verification role.

The proposal also introduces FIRE, an entity tasked with collecting revenue from various protocol sources, including fees, and using it to buy back and burn FLR tokens, thereby reducing their supply. Upon approval, several changes would take effect immediately, including a reduction in annual FLR inflation from 5% to 3% and a decrease in the hard cap from 5 billion to 3 billion tokens per year.

The base gas fee would increase 20-fold, from 60 gwei to 1,200 gwei, resulting in a significant rise in estimated annual FLR burn, from approximately 7.5 million to 300 million at current transaction volumes. Despite this increase, the cost of a standard Flare transaction would remain a fraction of a cent. With its roots in the XRP ecosystem, Flare has distributed its initial token supply to XRP holders and developed the FAssets system, which has produced over 150 million FXRP, bringing smart contract functionality to assets on blockchains like XRPL. As of late March 2026, the network reports over $160 million in total value locked and more than 887,000 active addresses.