LayerZero has proposed Otter, an automated market maker mechanism designed to strip block builders of the informational advantages that make front-running and sandwich attacks profitable. The name stands for Optimal Truthful Trading with Excess Redistribution, and the core idea is deceptively simple: if you clear trades as a batch instead of sequencing them one by one, the order of transactions stops mattering.
That’s the whole game. MEV, or miner extractable value, relies on block builders rearranging transaction order to profit at traders’ expense. Remove the sequencing advantage, and the economics of exploitation collapse.
How Otter actually works
Otter borrows from a well-studied corner of auction theory called the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism. In a VCG auction, each participant’s payment depends on the impact their bid has on everyone else, not on where their bid lands in a queue. It’s the same principle that powers second-price auctions, where the winner pays the second-highest bid rather than their own.
Applied to an AMM, this means trade execution outcomes are determined by the collective pool of bids submitted during a batch window rather than the precise nanosecond each one arrives. A block builder who tries to insert a front-running transaction gains nothing because the clearing price doesn’t shift based on ordering.
