Introductory
Mitigating Sandwich Attacks at the Protocol Level
- MEV and Me: Introduction + Consequences of MEV
- Excellent Tweetstorm Explanation of MEV
- Flashboys 2.0 (pdf): Original article on MEV, pre-flashbots
- Uncommon Core (Hasu Podcast): Interview with a Search (MEV Intern/Senpai)
- Notes from another listener
- Three big categories of MEV: arbitrage, sandwich, liquidations
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- a long tail of opportunities to exploit, a good strategy for newcomers
- Even miners think sandwich have bad reputation.
- Gas tokens: create data when gas low, destroy it to get refund when gas is high
- Flashbots publicly lists all included bundles
- If it's not on flashbots, it's hard to find
- Senpai does not submit some MEV on flashbots (private relays, or gas auction) for that reason
- other relays: ArcherDAO, bloxroute, direct to miner
- Blocksroute & direct to miner allow to do some strategies that you can't do with flashbots
- Flashbots get DDOSed (by submitting bad bundles that don't pay but have to be simulated)
- They "solved" it by disaggregating between a low prio and high prio queue - if you have a reputation you go the high prio, so DDOS only affects low prio queue.
- Protect against uncling by checking block depth or (better!!) hash of prev block (protects against reorgs)
- Some searchers search addesses starting with a bunch of zero as they can be stored in less storage on chain, costing less gas.
- Use flashbots to atomize/secretize your bundles & protect against sandwiches (archerswap does this)
- Some gas optimizations
Flashbots