Introducing the Flashbots Dashboard, a collection of real time metrics to give the community transparency on the Flashbots Network:

dashboard.flashbots.net

Thread πŸ‘‡πŸ»
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
Miners who run MEV-Geth and receive Flashbots bundles make extra ETH for doing so.

In fact miners make about ~5% more revenue for each Flashbots blocks they mine, and in total miners have made ~$45m in profit from Flashbots.
Measured in ETH or USD daily miner profit has been going up over time, and yesterday was Flashbots' most profitable day. About ~800 ETH or ~$3m in miner profit.

Mining Flashbots blocks is profitable because searchers' transactions pay more than the transactions they displace.
The πŸŸͺ line is the gas price of searchers' transactions & the 🟦 line is the gas price of txs at the tail end of blocks

The "tail gas price" txs are the least profitable for miners & are pushed out to make room for searchers' txs. Since πŸŸͺ > 🟦 this is profitable to do!
We've seen strong adoption by searchers because Flashbots is great for them too. Searchers only pay for txs if they are successful & can send groups of txs bundled together to be executed atomically

These are super powers that open up many new MEV opportunities
Quantifying the # of searchers is hard because a searcher can use multiple signing keys in the relay, multiple EOAs, and multiple contracts on-chain. We're moving towards a reputation system based on signing keys, but for now we've listed three different searcher adoption metrics
Quantifying how much profit searchers have made is also hard (we're working on it), but we can easily see how much they've paid to miners

The top searcher contract has paid $7.1m to miners in total, and 11 searcher contracts have paid more than $1m.
If you're interested in learning more about Flashbots and what we've been up to check out the latest Flashbots transparency report here:

medium.com/flashbots/flas…
Of course none of this would be possible without the tireless work of the inimitable Flashbots team
@phildaian @tzhen @epheph @ObadiaAlex @thegostep @jparyani @fiiiu_ @tkstanczak @EdgarArout @taarushv @LukeYoungblood @sui414
Lastly if you have any feedback or metric requests please post them here:

github.com/flashbots/pm/d…

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More from @bertcmiller

12 May
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
Earlier today Vitalik sold his Shibu on Uniswap, and @FrankResearcher documents that adventure well

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.
Read 13 tweets
12 May
Deleted my tweet about V getting sandwiched, he actually got backrun
This bot backran 3 different shibu transactions in a single block, including Vitalik's

Never seen that before
The plot thickens! The bot that backran Vitalik was actually Ethermine's.

They also run sandwich bots so it's interesting they chose to backrun him instead of sandwiching.
Read 4 tweets
22 Apr
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 πŸ§΅πŸ‘‡πŸ»

h/t @AlchemyPlatform for the artwork
If you haven't read about the OG uncle bandit then that would be a good place to start.

I won't repeat all the mechanisms of this attack here, but I made a previous thread on it:


Alchemy also had a good writeup: medium.com/alchemy-api/un…
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.
Read 15 tweets
15 Apr
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.
I woke up yesterday to a searcher extremely distraught because apparently only 1 of 3 transactions in their bundle landed on-chain.

What's worse is someone else's transaction seemed to have been added instead of their own.
A quick look and the searcher seemed to be right.

Only the "buy" part of a sandwich bundle they submitted had landed on-chain, and right after that buy someone else had inserted a 7 gas tx arb-ing it

Check the images for a bit more info
Read 22 tweets
11 Apr
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 πŸ‘‡πŸ»
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
Read 20 tweets
10 Apr
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 πŸ‘‡πŸ»
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.
Read 13 tweets

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