Rebar aims to launch Bitcoin-native MEV Shield by the end of 2024: CEO

Rebar Labs aims to launch the first Bitcoin-native platform to protect traders from Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) strategies by the end of 2024, CEO Alex Luce told Cointelegraph in an interview.

The emerging ecosystem of Bitcoin (BTC) native decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and Layer-2 scaling solutions (L2s) has boosted the oldest blockchain network but created new risks for traders, including malicious MEV.

“If we're talking about MEV right now, the most obvious example in Bitcoin is the front run,” Luce said. “It happens fairly often.”

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Rebar's Shield could be Bitcoin's equivalent to Ethereum's flashbots, which have secured an estimated $43 billion in decentralized exchange (DEX) transactions from MEV by 2021, Dunne Analytics reported.

Shield is designed to protect traders from malicious MEV and is encouraging interoperability within Bitcoin's fragmented DEX ecosystem.

“On Bitcoin, these DEXs are not interoperable, and liquidity is fragmented,” Luce said. “That's where a good MEV comes in – someone can get into it, even the price, and it can help users with performance.”

Rebar's Shield aims to increase the revenue of Bitcoin miners who process transactions and post them to Bitcoin's blockchain ledger.

“We're talking to some of the biggest miners in the space right now,” Luce said, adding that Rebar wants to launch the shield with the Bitcoin network's hashrate on board “at massive scale.”

Bitcoin originated as a simple peer-to-peer payment protocol, but the 2021 Taproot update enabled the network to support more complex activities, including the creation and trading of other tokens and the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Bitcoin-native decentralized finance (DeFi) is still in its infancy, and is largely limited to crypto-native merchants.

“Today, the daily volume is in the millions. It is not useful. “What we see as this space right now is a very early beta where you have that many users interacting with it,” Luce added.

“The target user today is very different from the target user we hope to see in 12 or 24 months.”

Meanwhile, Bitcoin-native L2s — such as Babylon, Core Chain, Rootstock, and Stack — are gaining traction.

The total value (TVL) locked in Bitcoin's L2s reached approximately $2 billion as of October 18, according to data from Defillama.

“In the next 12 months, if you can't get a good kill on Bitcoin, chances are you're going to L2,” Luce said. “I think it's a missed opportunity if that happens because Bitcoin is such a great market.”

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