A highly profitable bot is sandwiching @CurveFinance stablecoin trades with $100m+ swaps through a fascinating strategy to get leverage
Thread on the latest in sandwiching
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If you liked Salmonella you're gonna love this
Last night someone used an *extremely* clever mechanism to take a hundred ETH from sandwich bots
Then a 2nd person jumped in and made 300 MORE ETH by exploiting other sandwich bots
Long thread on how 👇🏻
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Imagine making 800 ETH in a single arb
... and an hour later then losing 1100 ETH to a hacker
Here is the story of 0xbaDc0dE, an MEV bot who gained and lost it all in a few hours tonight
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Quick look:
- Punk was put up to sale by contract A
- Contract B takes out a massive flashloan and buys punk from contract A
- When contract A receives ETH from B it immediately sent all of it back to B
- Contract B then used the ETH to repay their flashloan
Punk 9998 bought for 124,457.07 ETH ($532,414,877.01 USD) by 0x9b5a5c from 0x8e3983. larvalabs.com/cryptopunks/de… #cryptopunks #ethereum
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Today an NFT started minting with a function which unfortunately which lets anyone drain all their ETH
A few hours later there was an MEV bot skirmish over the ETH in this contract, here's a short thread with some details
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Announcement: Flashbots has open sourced our block builder
writings.flashbots.net/open-…
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Every tx from this searcher has a hash starting with 0xbeef. Never seen anything like that before.
Went to Etherscan to check this person out and of course their ens is "bigbrainchad.eth" and their function selector is "Code Is Law."
In seriousness symbolic execution bots have been around for years now, no surprise that simple exploits get taken next block
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Ok so netting this out:
- This wasn't a real sale
- This wasn't an exploit either
- No one made money
- They probably did this to generate a bunch of buzz about it on Twitter and troll a bit
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MASSIVE MEV payments after someone market sold 65k ETH
~720 ETH arb (biggest FB bundle payment ever!)
~540 ETH
~420 ETH
~310 ETH
Absolutely insane
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Last week a monster in Ethereum's dark forest revealed themselves to me.
This blog post tells the story of that encounter:
bertcmiller.com/2021/12/28/g…
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A few hours ago an MEV bot landed a ~300 ETH arb and the function they called is literally named "printMoney"
etherscan.io/tx/0x631a4941eb…
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Even @VitalikButerin can't escape the monsters of the dark forest
Twitter wasn't the only party watching Vitalik's wallet. As always bots were ready to extract what value they could from his pending transactions.
Brief recap of those bots and what Vitalik did
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Announcing Flashbots Protect: a suite of tools that makes it easier to use Flashbots for frontrunning protection
The first two Protect products are an API for developers and an RPC endpoint for end users
A brief thread about these products
medium.com/flashbots/announc…
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A note on Flashbots, mev-boost, our (currently) centralized infrastructure, and competition
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Today, we introduce a new thesis: MEV has become the dominant limit to scaling blockchains.
Spectacularly wasteful onchain searching is starting to consume most of the capacity of most high-throughput blockchains.
This is a market failure we can no longer ignore.
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New MEV just dropped: @moonbirds_xyz arbitrage
Searcher bought for 44 ETH and sold it for 240 ETH in the same transaction, pocketing a cool ~180 ETH for themselves after fees
etherscan.io/tx/0x0659a203bd…
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Fatal flaws in a bot, a sort of on-chain virus, a trojan horse token, and arbitrage gone wrong
Join me in looking at the latest MEV bot exploit in this thread 👇🏻
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This week a bot drained ~30 ETH from🥪 bots using clever baiting and a fake Uniswap pool
A thread on 🥪 bots, how they defend themselves, and the latest in breaking those defenses 👇🏻🧵
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imagine being hacked for $1m and having to negotiate with someone roleplaying as a pirate to get it back
.@imagine_mev points out to me that someone posing as the attacker actually came into the Flashbots discord to try to contact the victim
And they roleplayed as a pirate 😅🏴☠️
discord.com/channels/7554667…
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Alright everybody, join me as I relay a heist that took place across blocks yesterday and unveil a novel form of MEV.
Again it will be a long and semi-technical journey but I think it is worth it.
Alright just confirmed an insane instance of MEV extraction in the wild
Buckle up for the thread I'm gonna write about this one
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Let’s get a few things straight.
Eden's lead investor - @multicoin - is lying about Flashbots and Eden.
🧵
6/ Our investment thesis is that rational arbitrage traders will continue buying and staking EDEN until the value of staked EDEN is equal to the discounted cash flow value of expected future arbitrage profits on Ethereum.
Read more here:
multicoin.capital/2021/09/08…
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2 INSANE arbs happened on Arbitrum a few hours ago. $5m+ in profit, and one was the largest arb of all time I think.
arbiscan.io/tx/0x07bee5a83b2…
arbiscan.io/tx/0xba3e786b282…
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1 year ago @NathanWorsley_ fired the 1st shot in a year of bot on bot attacks with Ethereum's most sophisticated actors
Millions of dollars were made and lost in what amounted to one of the most interesting subplots of crypto
Lets review last year's bot on bot attacks
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Earlier today a bot drained a competitor's contract for 8.25 ETH
... Then a few hours later returned 5.9 ETH, warned them of 🦈s, and told them to be more careful
etherscan.io/tx/0x49fc137c8f…
etherscan.io/tx/0xc4c5b848f1…
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Dropping what is probably the most alpha packed thing I've written so far: an in-depth writeup of my strategy for a highly competitive MEV opportunity, the Synthetix Ether Collateral Liquidations, along with code
Blog post:
bertcmiller.com/2021/09/05/m…
Repo:
github.com/bertmiller/sMEV
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Longest arb ever? 14 hops across 10 assets for ~0.0025 ETH in profit
etherscan.io/tx/0x039a2697fd…
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Never seen a 1 transaction block before
One NFT mint took 30m gas (!)
etherscan.io/txs?block=14114…
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Did a double take when reading about the Dutch East India Company and… their MEV strategy?
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The @InverseFinance hack is one of the most MEV aware hacks I've seen:
- held an oracle's price at an insane level across multiple blocks
- prevented arb bots from bringing prices back in line
- protected against generalized frontrunners
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A brief thread on a novel MEV searching strategy, where we chase the trail of a mysterious bot backrunning private flow and reveal how they do it.
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Today Flashbots releases v0.2 and introduces bundle merging. That means that Flashbots miners can now mine multiple bundles per block.
A thread digging into this huge release and what that means 👇🏻
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Did you think that only DEX trades could be sandwiched anon?
Think again, cryptopunks can too
A thread on punk sandwiches
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This is something I've never seen before.
To frontrun an exploit in the mempool a generalized frontrunner copied the exploiter's 4 (!) previous transactions stretching 50 blocks (!) into the past.
That copied the exploiter's contract and setup for the exploit.
Interestingly this actually looks like a generalized frontrunner did it. 0x15d8 deployed a very similar contract and did the same setup, but once he submitted the work() transaction to the mempool, 0x67a copied the entire setup and did it all in block 16384470, one block before
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The owner of the first poisonous token noticed their victim was the latest predator on the block and they dropped a cryptographically signed note of respect in the Flashbots discord
I loved this.
etherscan.io/verifySig/2503
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Rediscovered what I think is the biggest on-chain arb of all time: a 1200+ ETH arb
etherscan.io/tx/0xb72689042f…
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Oof. Someone fat fingered the price they wanted to sell their punk at - offering it at 4.44 ETH instead of 4444 ETH.
Bot swooped in and bought it and paid the miner 3.33 ETH, making the total cost 7.77 ETH for a punk.
etherscan.io/tx/0xb2a9a40bfe…
Punk 7557 bought for 4.44 ETH ($19,366.33 USD) by 0x6f60c2 from 0xcbdcc4. larvalabs.com/cryptopunks/de… #cryptopunks #ethereum
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Announcing Flashbots Protect Fast Mode 🔥🏎
Fast mode is a way of using the Flashbots relay with a different set of tradeoffs, giving you more choice when transacting on Ethereum.
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Introducing MEV-Share: programmably private orderflow that empowers users, redistributes MEV, and takes a step towards decentralized block building
MEV-Share is where transactions and bundles find their perfect match
collective.flashbots.net/t/m…
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An Ethereum Uncle Bandit strikes again, this time for 145 ETH
However this time the bandit left a trail to their identity, and you'll learn who it is in this MEV story 🧵👇🏻
h/t @AlchemyPlatform for the artwork
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Found a clever honey pot contract
At a glance it looks vulnerable: an admin provides a string that is used as a key. Anyone that calls a function w/ 1 ETH and the string takes away 30 ETH.
So just find the admin's transaction and copy the string, right?
etherscan.io/address/0xb58cb…
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Flashbots' mev-inspect data is now live on @DuneAnalytics!
Now anyone can run data analytics on Flashbots' historical database of arbitrages, liquidations, and sandwiches on the Ethereum mainnet.
dune.com/blog/flashbots-data
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Here's the payment for the punk, punk transfer, and return of the money in red, I think
ethtx.info/mainnet/0x92488a0…
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MEV isn't for the faint of heart
Here's a searcher whose contract had a bug and got exploited, losing them $1m in a single transaction (!)
etherscan.io/tx/0xcc25b53fdc…
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Introducing simple-blind-arbitrage: an open source bot that blindly but atomically backruns private transactions from MEV-Share Matchmakers.
github.com/flashbots/simple-…
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Instead of doomscrolling here are some past MEV events with gold content you might not know about
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Today Flashbots is releasing v0.4 and introducing mega bundles to the Flashbots Network
Mega bundles will let us innovate faster, support more bundles and will lead to new searcher strategies and more miner revenue
A thread on mega bundles 🧵👇🏻
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Couple of people DMing me lately asking for how to get started writing bots
So I'm reupping this video of @epheph and I walking through Flashbots' open source simple arb bot!
piped.video/watch?v=wn8r674U…
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Attacker refunds $100k and leaves a message for their victim:
"I hope this helps you get back on your feet. Good luck."
Only in crypto.
etherscan.io/tx/0xeaac25cad1…
MEV isn't for the faint of heart
Here's a searcher whose contract had a bug and got exploited, losing them $1m in a single transaction (!)
etherscan.io/tx/0xcc25b53fdc…
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So this one is interesting! A bot has been backrunning new token listings, effectively paying premium to miners to buy newly listed tokens before anyone else can
And a new token fought back yesterday, trapping the bot for $200k while benefiting from their buy. Here's how 👇🏻
⚡️🤖 FlashBots 0-Gas-Price tx ⚡️🤖
Miner payment: 68.13 ETH (277,378 GWEI @ 245,621 gas)
etherscan.io/tx/0x36712b089e…
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Went to Etherscan to check this person out and of course their ens is "bigbrainchad.eth" and their function selector is "Code Is Law."
In seriousness symbolic execution bots have been around for years now, no surprise that simple exploits get taken next block
Do not make mistakes when you deploy contracts! Backrun bots today can automatically hack any easy-to-hack contracts.
Someone just lost 5ETH because of an access control issue - a backrun bot hacked it in less than 12s after deployment.
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Sorry everyone, long overdue, but its time for a new MEV thread
Today we look at the Flashbots auction and the searchers that were able to game it using a super clever exploit in how we priced and merged bundles
Let's go 👇🏻🧵
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For years this bot has been making transactions every ~12 hours with nothing but a message.
The message always starts with “DC-L5” and has a different seemingly encrypted message after that.
Anyone know what it is?
etherscan.io/address/0xbc280…
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In the last three hour a single MEV bot landed has two $2m+ arbs, taking home almost all of one and ~30 ETH of another
etherscan.io/tx/0x3b5fc9f804…
etherscan.io/tx/0xb6ae673a7d…
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In the aftermath one bot operator ominously pointed out that 🥪-ing is never safe & said they'd leak the alpha once it was used.
The dark forest is a dangerous place.
As last night shows even those who think they are predators might turn out to be prey.
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Flashloan #BAYC arbitrage
Some poor soul fatfinger listed their BAYC for 10 ETH and it was instantly sniped by a searcher who sold it into an offer to buy any BAYC in the same tx
The miner was paid 38 ETH and I think the searcher made ~20 ETH of profit
etherscan.io/tx/0x841c2ebe79…
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.@imagine_mev points out to me that someone posing as the attacker actually came into the Flashbots discord to try to contact the victim
And they roleplayed as a pirate 😅🏴☠️
discord.com/channels/7554667…
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Big Flashbots Protect update today:
You can now see the status of your pending Protect transactions on @etherscan!
Next time you send a transaction through Protect make sure to check it out on Etherscan
⚡️⚡️⚡️
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Back when someone taking a $1m loan was a big deal 👇🏻
Today someone took out a $1,000,000 loan using #Ethereum. No questions were asked. No approval process. No paper work. No brokerage account needed. No trusting a bank.
Global access to financial services are here with an Ethereum address, a few clicks and a $0.73 transaction fee
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.@NathanWorsley_ inspired an army to try to bait 🥪bots w/ bad ERC20s after publishing his article on Salmonella
In short Salmonella is a token that transfers less if you're not the owner, so 🥪bots way overpaid and got REKT for 100 ETH
github.com/Defi-Cartel/salmo…
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Figured it out, I think
Searchers are watching for new accounts to bridge to Base
Then they spam the chain with buys for those accounts' FT shares, trying to blindly land behind the new account whenever it buys
The wins outweigh the cost of reverts. Strat explained below.
Pretty amusing to see searchers figuring out every possible surface area to get an edge on Base live - took... 24 hours after the surge of activity for a mempool leakage to be discovered?
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Surprised that at this point this stuff happens on-chain and there's not a thread about it 4 hours later.
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MEV-Explore v1 is live!
Major updates:
- Uses mev-inspect-py (previously used -rs)
- Added Uniswap v3
- Fixed a bug where some 🥪 were classified as arbs
Please note these numbers are lower bound estimates and not reflective of all MEV extracted
explore.flashbots.net/
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A nice demonstration of why protocols need to design in an MEV aware way from day 1
There was an edge in having many non-validating nodes on Avalanche, so MEV bots launched 1000s of them "dragging the whole network down" with increased load/latencies
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A post mortem on the mev-boost relay vulnerability yesterday and a brief discussion on a related timing issue: collective.flashbots.net/t/p…
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Yesterday Flashbots published MEV-SGX, our proposal for using secure enclaves to provide a private mempool and a sealed bid MEV auction.
Thread on how MEV-SGX works and why it matters 👇🏻
ethresear.ch/t/mev-sgx-a-sea…
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The Future of MEV is SUAVE
...
writings.flashbots.net/the-f…
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@hasufl @fifikobayashi @Fiskantes @twobitidiot @defiprime @bneiluj check out the insane sandwich bot baiting that took place last night above 👆🏻
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Introducing the Flashbots Dashboard, a collection of real time metrics to give the community transparency on the Flashbots Network:
dashboard.flashbots.net/
Thread 👇🏻
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Over half of blocks on ETH mainnet have a transaction protected from frontrunning by Flashbots Protect 🎉
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In 2025 ETH & its L2s will have:
- isolated L1 proposers from MEV's economic centralization
- much more decentralized L1 building / L2 sequencing
- widespread MEV mitigation at the app / user level
- many MEV experiments (Timeboost, MEV taxes, etc)
~4 years of work paying off
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I still think about the time when a hacker stole a million dollars from a Flashbots searcher's contract and then returned most of it after pretending to be a pirate in our discord
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I’d love to know how much money the top Luna/UST minting arb bots have made in the last 24 hours
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Dug a bit more into the @inversefinance hack with the help of some searchers (h/t: @imagine_mev, Riposte)
The attack is a little more nuanced than I / others thought. Brief thread.
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A funny arb spotted in the Flashbots Discord (h/t: Riposte)
Searcher went from 0.0001 ETH to 0.46 ETH, paid 0.42 ETH to the miner... and they left $1m on the table
etherscan.io/tx/0x0f419881bf…
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I think this bot is making ~$10k/day ish across their many novel strategies after launching ~40 days ago.
Have to wonder how much MEV is out there that requires equally or even more complicated strategies that hasn't been discovered yet
A highly profitable bot is sandwiching @CurveFinance stablecoin trades with $100m+ swaps through a fascinating strategy to get leverage
Thread on the latest in sandwiching
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Question about optimistic (and ZK?) rollups: I understand you can exit your ETH back to L1 even if the sequencer is down.
But what if I have my ETH in a smart contract? Or if I have, say, an ETH-DAI Uni v3 position? Can/how do I exit my ETH back to L1?
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A brief thread on 4844 and block building
Blobs add significant additional size to blocks. That size adds significant extra latency to building while builders are in a cut throat competition to reduce latency.
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MEV-Share is Flashbots' product for MEV redistribution. The beta is live @ rpc.flashbots.net
If you are a user, wallet, or dapp use our new features here: docs.flashbots.net/flashbots…
Read on on for more on what MEV-Share is, the bigger picture, and what is next
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MEV-Boost payments were at an alltime high yesterday, totaling 7691 ETH (!) which is nearly double the previous ATH of 3928 ETH during the FTX fiasco this fall.
A few statistics on MEV on Ethereum yesterday in this thread
(h/t @nero_eth for the data)
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