Understanding MEV yield in your dashboard
MEV — maximal extractable value — is one of the more confusing lines in a validator's income, so this article covers what it is, how it reaches your validator, and how TrueStake records it. It does not tell you how to treat MEV on your tax return — that's a question for your tax professional, and we link to a hedged research note on the topic below.
What MEV is
MEV is extra value a block proposer can earn from how the transactions inside their block are ordered and bundled — beyond the flat priority fees a transaction sender bids for inclusion. Arbitrageurs, liquidators, and other specialized actors pay for favorable transaction ordering, and MEV-Boost is the mechanism that routes a share of that value to the validator that proposes the block.
What counts as MEV (and what doesn't)
- Priority fees — the tip a transaction sender pays for faster inclusion — are not MEV. They're a normal, expected part of every block a validator proposes.
- MEV specifically refers to the extra value from bundling and ordering — arbitrage, liquidations, and similar opportunities — that specialized builders capture and bid for.
- Both land at the same fee recipient address and are execution-layer income, but they arrive through different mechanisms.
How MEV-Boost gets it to your validator
Your node registers a fee recipient address with one or more relays. Specialized builders assemble candidate blocks and bid for your validator's slot; your validator's MEV-Boost client takes the best bid on offer. When your validator proposes that block, the winning builder's payment lands at your fee recipient address — on-chain, in the same block.
How TrueStake records it
TrueStake doesn't take a relay's word for it. For every block your validator proposes, TrueStake queries the relay's delivered-payload data directly, and separately cross-checks that figure against the actual on-chain balance movement at your fee recipient address. If the two disagree — a relay outage, a data gap — the on-chain settlement wins; it's the authority, not the relay's report. That's the same reconciliation discipline TrueStake applies everywhere. Each payment becomes a fee-recipient payment receipt, reconciled to the wei, with the raw relay payload and the on-chain reference both preserved as evidence.
Where it shows up
In your dashboard, MEV appears as execution-layer income alongside priority fees — separate lines, since they arrive through different mechanisms, but both part of what your validator earned proposing the block. In your Tax Report, each MEV payment is its own income row, valued at fair market value on its recognition date, with a citation and an on-chain reference you can hand to a CPA.
Is MEV income taxable?
TrueStake records MEV payments as income-bearing receipts at fair market value, consistent with how it treats other execution-layer income — the same reconciliation, the same citation discipline. That's a recordkeeping statement, not a tax position. How MEV income should be characterized on your return is a question for your tax professional. If you want the current state of the research, see Is MEV income taxable?
Questions?
Email support@truestake.io if a specific MEV receipt in your account doesn't look right, or if you want help understanding a particular block's payment.