Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is the profit available from reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions in a blockchain block. On Ethereum, searchers compete for this value through auctions — bidding for the right to extract it. The standard assumption: auction format doesn’t matter much. The Revenue Equivalence Theorem says that under standard conditions, all common auction formats yield the same expected revenue.

2.2 million transactions prove the theorem’s assumptions are violated (arXiv:2603.16333). MEV searchers’ valuations are affiliated — they’re estimating the same underlying opportunity using correlated signals. Affiliation breaks revenue equivalence. When bidders’ estimates are correlated, open auctions (English, second-price sealed-bid) strictly dominate closed ones (Dutch, first-price). The gap: 14-28% at moderate affiliation, translating to $10-18 million in unrealized revenue during the study period alone.

The mechanism is the Milgrom-Weber linkage principle: in open auctions, bidders learn from each other’s behavior. When your estimate of an opportunity is correlated with mine, watching me bid tells you something about the true value. This information linkage drives up prices. Sealed-bid formats deny bidders this information, and the lower competition produces lower revenue.

The through-claim: the auction format is leaving money on the table. Not because the format is broken, but because it was designed under assumptions that don’t hold for MEV. Searchers aren’t independent — they’re reading the same mempool, running similar strategies, and estimating the same opportunities. The correlation is structural, not incidental. And the structural correlation means the auction design matters more, not less, than the standard theory predicts.