Oval Overview

Oval enables the capture of Oracle Extractable Value.

Oval enables protocols to capture MEV that is created as a result of Chainlink price updates. We call this Oracle Extractable Value (OEV), and it is a subset of MEV. Money market protocols (like Compound or Aave) in particular create OEV during liquidations, and Oval allows those protocols to capture it. This benefits the protocol as well as disrupts the MEV supply chain.

Note that Oval is not an oracle; rather, it is a tool that lets you wrap Chainlink to enable OEV auctions to run on top of it. This works by running auctions within Flashbot's MEV-share infrastructure.

This section of the docs covers how Oval works at a high level. See Problemand System Overview for more details.