Eden Network, a priority transaction network that protects Ethereum traders from arbitrary block reordering, said today it has raised $17.4 million in funding.

The seed round was led by Multicoin Capital and included Jump Capital LLC, Alameda Research, Wintermute Trading Ltd., GSR and Defiance Capital.

Eden provides private and priority transactions for traders and miners on the Ethereum blockchain to help deal with an issue known as “miner extractable value” or MEV. Because miners choose transactions from the public mempool — the queue in which all transactions await to be added to blocks on the blockchain — they can also pick which order they are being added to blocks and can exploit their execution order.

For example, an investor could see an arbitrage opportunity between exchanges for a pair of tokens and then decide to execute the trade on the open network. A malicious miner or bot notices the trade occurring. The miner executes its own trade, then reorders the transactions within the block so that its trade happens first, robbing the investor of the opportunity.

“Eden Network represents a fairer, more democratic and market-driven approach to fixing MEV than anything that has come before it,” said Tushar Jain, managing partner at Multicoin Capital. “Blockspace priority should be accessible to everyone, not just private mempools operators or exclusive bundling networks.

Eden officially went live with the Ethereum London hard fork on Aug. 5, and it now represents more than 50% of the hashpower, meaning the power that a computer uses to run and solve different hashing algorithms, on Ethereum. This means that more Eden blocks are now being produced on the Ethereum blockchain than non-Eden blocks.

To participate in the network, users need only stake EDEN tokens and then they can access priority blockspace as well as the Eden Relay Remote Procedure Call that allows transactions to be submitted privately from the public Ethereum mempool.

More sophisticated traders and applications will also have access to Eden’s “Slot Tenant” auctions. These processes transactions on one of the three top slots of every Ethereum block and make certain that they have priority above all other parties in Eden blocks.

The company claims this will help avoid malicious MEV actors including bots and miners attempting to steal arbitrage opportunities.

The Eden Network is currently supported by some of the largest Ethereum mining pools in the world, including Sushi, Band Protocol, Alpha Finance Labs and Bancor.

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