Hidden within Ethereum’s shadowy depths, alert MEV bots lie in ambush, ready to strike at any opportunity before their rivals can react.
Whether it’s executing a high-slippage swap for a quick sandwich play or exploiting a poorly secured contract, generalized searchers are solely focused on one goal—profit.
Just 12 seconds elapsed between the introduction of a vulnerable token contract and the extraction of 5 ETH (about $12,000).
Read more: Aave exploited via periphery contract — $56K taken from ‘tip jar’
This incident was highlighted by Chaofan Shou, co-founder of the crypto security tool Fuzzland, who characterized the INUMI contract’s flaw as an “access control issue.”
The MEV bot associated with the ENS name bigbrainchad.eth, successfully included its attack transaction in the very next block after the target contract’s creation.
The Dark Forest
Bots seek MEV (maximal extractable value) by scrutinizing transactions submitted by other users for potential profit opportunities.
Typically, this involves examining Ethereum’s ‘mempool’ of pending transactions and frontrunning lucrative moves by replicating them with a higher gas fee (to ensure the bot’s transaction is prioritized).
This technique can be complemented by a ‘backrun’ transaction to orchestrate a sandwich attack on high-slippage swaps, often resulting in significant losses for the original user.
Backrunning can also be employed in a less harmful manner, capitalizing on smaller arbitrage chances created by the price discrepancies following swaps on decentralized exchanges (DEX).
More generalized bots, like bigbrainchad.eth, however, transcend basic DEX trades and are now set to exploit more intricate opportunities, even if it necessitates executing a hack to secure the rewards.
Read more: Ethervista ‘unconsciously hacked’ hundreds of times by bot
Nonetheless, MEV bots can sometimes appear as the unexpected saviors during tumultuous periods in DeFi. In last year’s tumultuous hack of Curve Finance, a bot named 0xc0ffebabe frontran an attack transaction for over $5M in ETH before returning the funds.
‘Cryptographic performance art’
Members of the MEV community were struck by the level of sophistication displayed by bigbrainchad.eth, albeit not for the reasons one might anticipate.
Although acknowledging that bots capable of compromising a vulnerable contract have existed for quite some time, Bert Miller from Flashbots was genuinely impressed by the transaction hashes generated by the bot, all beginning with 0xbeef.
Read more: Bots are front-running bots front-running Base meme coins
‘Mining’ these vanity hashes for no other purpose than to flaunt on Etherscan adds an extra layer of effort and cost to what is already a razor-thin competition against other searchers.
The ostentatious on-chain operator clearly possesses confidence in their skills, prompting one observer to describe this display as “cryptographic performance art.”
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