My guess is that Ethermine submitted both a sandwich and the triple backrun, and the only reason why Vitalik didn't get sandwiched is because it was more profitable for the miner to accept triple backruns instead of a 1 sandwich.
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In January Flashbots released Flashbots Alpha v0.1, a proof of concept communication channel between miners and users that enables transparent and efficient MEV extraction.
Since then we've seen rapid adoption, and now over 30% of blocks on Ethereum are Flashblocks.
Flashbots has two types of direct users today: searchers & miners
Searchers are users who send transactions via Flashbots - today these are mostly bot operators extracting MEV
Miners are the block producers of Ethereum today, who want to extract MEV in a fair & transparent way
Normally when you swap on Uniswap the transaction is publicly relayed through nodes until it reaches miners. Due to this anyone who wants to can see the transaction before it is mined.
Our investigation starts with this massive - but otherwise innocuous - Flashbots transaction that has 0 gas price and a payment of 80 ETH to a miner. Makes sense.
It looked at first like someone sniping a new token on Uniswap.
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 👇🏻
To understand how this happened you need to know a bit about Flashbots
You can think of Flashbots as a way for users to directly communicate their transaction ordering preferences to to miners via "bundles" of transactions
Instead of users paying transaction fees via gas prices, using Flashbots users pay fees via a smart contract call (block.coinbase.transfer) which transfers ETH to a miner
Here's a screenshot of a random arb that does this, note the 0 gas price & 0.075 ETH transfer to Spark Pool
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 👇🏻
For weeks this bot has been monitoring the Ethereum mempool for new pairs being created on Uniswap. If it finds one it the bot places a buy transaction immediately behind the initial liquidity. That way they can buy a new token before anyone else.
They've been paying miners huge amounts for the right to do this! You can see here a few of the top Flashbots bundles of all time are from this bot. In total they've paid 340 ETH to miners.
Side note: this is from a dashboard Flashbots is making public soon.