How Shutter Accelerated MEV Prevention Research with Olas Agents
About Shutter
Shutter is an open-source protocol focused on preventing harmful Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) attacks and censorship. Shutter’s threshold encryption protocol enables diverse applications, including MEV prevention, censorship resistance, voting integrity, and gaming fairness.
About Olas
Olas is the network for co-owning AI. Olas enables everyone to own a share of AI, specifically autonomous agents. One of the first Crypto x AI projects, founded in 2021, Olas offers the composable Olas Stack for developing autonomous AI agents, and the Olas Protocol for incentivizing their creation and co-ownership. Olas' mission is to incentivize and coordinate different parties to launch autonomous agents that form entire AI economies serving all humans. Olas is giving rise to agent economies across major blockchains. Check the Olas website to see how many hundreds of thousands of transactions have been made. Learn more at olas.network.
Challenge
Shutter aimed to address crypto transaction manipulation by conducting an AI-powered experiment using autonomous agents on the Gnosis Chain. The experiment focused on simulating various MEV attacks—such as front-running and sandwich attacks—to evaluate how effectively Shutter’s encrypted mempool could mitigate them. Since MEV attacks have cost Ethereum traders over $1.4 billion since 2020, finding a scalable and efficient solution was critical.
However, conducting this experiment required highly skilled Olas agent developers capable of building agents to simulate these attacks and evaluate Shutter’s transaction ordering strategies.
Solution
Shutter put up a proposal to the DAO for an Olas agent developer and Isotropic Solutions was selected through the community-driven decision. Isotropic Solutions is an Olas developer academy-certified development agency that has put three of its developers through training with the Olas stack. Through this relationship, Isotropic has developed Olas agents necessary to evaluate different transaction ordering strategies and measure how effectively the Shutter encrypted mempool mitigates manipulation. Key project milestones include:
- August 2024: Shutter DAO 0x36, a fully decentralized on-chain Decentralized Autonomous Organization ran an RFP to select and fund Isotropic to build the system.
- November 2024: Launch of initial real-world trading simulations.
- December 2024: Full deployment of autonomous agents and launch of a real-time dashboard to track insights and performance.
Results
Shutter was successfully matched with Olas certified agent academy graduates resulting in the first use of autonomous agents in a live environment to accelerate MEV prevention research and transaction ordering strategies. By harnessing Olas’ advanced AI agents, Shutter moves beyond theoretical research, creating a dynamic testing setup that fast-tracks the development of resolutions against malicious trading tactics. In this environment, some AI agents operate within Shutter’s encrypted mempool, while others interact with an open mempool, enabling a direct, side-by-side comparison of transaction security.
"Isotropic and Shutter DAO 0x36 are building on Olas to conduct AI-driven experiments using autonomous agents on Shutter’s encrypted mempool which is integrated into Gnosis Chain. The potential of Olas agents for economic simulations and stress testing like this is massive. The agents need to be decentralized and co-owned and Olas enables that." - Luis Bezzenberger, Head of Product, Brainbot, and Core Contributor to Shutter