@bertcmiller ⚡️🤖 Profile picture
⚡️ @ Flashbots // Optimist who is always learning.
x0_KΞMIᵍᵐ Profile picture Jerome Ku Profile picture G Profile picture DoctorSelf.eth // A Painter of Echoes // #PSYFAM Profile picture Jean Philippe Profile picture 15 subscribed
Dec 6, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
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. @blairmarshall pointed out a bot that appears to have private access to user orderflow that was landing bottom-of-the-block blocks on the Flashbots builder. That didn't make sense to me. We don't run backrunning bots! So we investigated.
May 10, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
jaredfromsubway.eth's alpha and how to stop him jaredfromsubway.eth is a prolific sandwich bot who went viral a few weeks back

They famously were sandwiching a TON of $PEPE traders and are frequently one of the top consumers of gas on the network

Why are they dominating sandwiches? What's their edge?

Keep scrolling, anon.
May 2, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
Introducing simple-blind-arbitrage: an open source bot that blindly but atomically backruns private transactions from MEV-Share Matchmakers.

github.com/flashbots/simp… simple-blind-arbitrage works by calculating and executing the optimal arbitrage on-chain.

It only requires the pools to attempt to arb as inputs, and does the rest in a smart contract. Image
Mar 12, 2023 13 tweets 7 min read
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) You can't compare stats these 1:1, but the ATH for daily miner profit from mev-geth was 6397 ETH in June 2021. That's the *profit* of running mev-geth vs a vanilla mempool mining client.

Mar 11, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
Brutal & unfortunate. A bad aggregator led to a user getting rekt.

A reason that a competitive MEV market & orderflow auctions are deeply important is that cases like this could potentially be entirely mitigated. The user could be paid back the arb that their wreckage left. The user's $2m ended up in a Uni v2 pool, which an MEV bot was quick to snatch up for basically nothing of course. They paid a premium to a miner for this $2m but it really wasn't anything (~20 ETH).

Feb 15, 2023 11 tweets 4 min read
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/mev-share-pr… MEV-Share builds on MEV-Boost by further unbundling the transaction supply chain.

Whereas MEV-Boost enabled collaboration between validators and builders, MEV-Share does the same for searchers and users - empowering users to be paid for their transactions.
Jan 12, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
How this frontrunner works (probably):
1. Monitor the mempool for tornado cash withdraws to fresh accounts
2. Watch if these accounts deploy contracts
3. Simulate transactions to these contracts
4. If any of them generate profit copy the contract and frontrun all txs in a bundle h/t: @YannickCrypto

Definitely a frontrunning bot designed to catch big hacks every once in awhile. Makes sense.

Still don't get why exploiters don't use private mempools though.
Dec 2, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
Fascinating insider look at an MEV operation which, at one point, was ~90 - ~100% of the market on Avalanche ImageImage This is also the *exact opposite* of what we want. MEV should be open, permissionless and transparent - not driven by business development done behind closed doors 😬 Image
Nov 23, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
Nov 23, 2022 21 tweets 4 min read
The Future of MEV is SUAVE

...

writings.flashbots.net/the-future-of-… SUAVE is the Single Unified Auction for Value Expression.

It is our vision for the future of MEV, and what we think needs to be built to make sure crypto and finance are decentralized.

An answer to the four hoursemen of MEV that I tweeted about last week
Nov 18, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Announcement: Flashbots has open sourced our block builder

writings.flashbots.net/open-sourcing-… Image MEV-Boost was created to mitigate the centralization risk that MEV posed to Ethereum validators.

It enables any validator, from solo enthusiast to largest staking pool, to maximize their rewards by outsourcing block creation to a market of specialized entities called builders.
Oct 5, 2022 21 tweets 6 min read
A note on Flashbots, mev-boost, our (currently) centralized infrastructure, and competition Flashbots is committed to building an open, permissionless, and transparent MEV ecosystem.

We've been building towards that since day one when we first released mev-geth and embarked on our journey to frontrun the MEV crisis.
Sep 27, 2022 12 tweets 2 min read
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 0xbaDc0dE is the prefix of the contract for a mempool bot that's been pretty active on ETH in the last few months.

In that time they sent ~220k transactions to Ethereum, I believe all arbs or trying to cancel arbs.

Address: 0xbadc0defafcf6d4239bdf0b66da4d7bd36fcf05a
Sep 17, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
Flashbots builder pub keys:

0xa1dead01...6289ef27f
0x81babeec...3dbc8e80f
0x81beef03...cb7bcb994f
0xa1defa73...81ff84fc1b You can back these out by looking for our graffiti in extra data too
Sep 17, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
For mev-boost blocks:

Proposer payment - equal to the eth value of the last tx in the block

Builder profit - equal to the difference in the fee recipient's eth balance before and after the block

Here's an example of a proposer payment
etherscan.io/txs?block=1553… Proposer profit - the difference between what the proposer is paid for a block and what the the value of a mempool block would have been

Can't be derived from just on-chain data unfortunately, but have some data coming out on that in the next week or two
Sep 10, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
The other day @nikete reminded me of this wild moment last year where Justin Sun had a $1b ETH position on @LiquityProtocol which could have been liquidated during market turmoil, but wasn't

Sharing in case some folks missed it the first time. Some details in case you're curious. I believe the conclusion was he could've been liquidated but wasn't by chance and a bunch of bot misfires.
medium.com/liquity/how-li…

Aug 1, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Since value left in DEX routers is topical right now this is a funny long tail MEV bot:

etherscan.io/address/0x4cad…

1inch router occasionally has dust in it that anyone can sweep. This bot watches for that and sweeps it out, sometimes making as little as ~$3 (!). 1inch routing tries to not keep erc20 tokens in its router, but occasionally leaves dollars of tokens in the router for gas reasons

Over time these accumulate. Some people watch for that.
Jul 7, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
Random interesting thing I noticed on-chain this morning: someone sent money to an address and THEN another account deployed a contract which rescued that money

Without the contract later deployed the 0.6 ETH would've been unrecoverable

etherscan.io/address/0xA49D… Image If we dig into the rescuer's transaction history we can see them rapidly making a lot of transactions to themself, then deploying the rescue transaction

That's because contract addresses on Ethereum are deterministic! They're a function of the account address, nonce, and code. Image
Jul 6, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read
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 Image The vulnerability here is simple.

ownerWithdrawAllTo() is a function that sends all the ETH in the contract to an address the caller can specify.

The author forgot to a check to ensure only the owner of the contract can call this, which exists on other functions.
May 20, 2022 21 tweets 8 min read
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 If you're new to 🥪s then check this out for a brief description of how they work

Apr 2, 2022 10 tweets 3 min read
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. The transaction to manipulate the oracle price was submitted in block N (14506358) as a bundle so arb bots didn't see it in the mempool. Thus they couldn't bring the price for block N back in line.

etherscan.io/tx/0x20a6dcff0…