Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, adversaries extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smart contracts. Some have characterized the Ethereum peer-to-peer network as a dark forest, wherein broadcast transactions represent prey, which are devoured by generalized trading bots. While transaction (re)ordering and front-running are known to cause losses to users, we quantify how much value was sourced from blockchain extractable value (BEV). We systematize a transaction ordering taxonomy to quantify the USD extracted from sandwich attacks, liquidations, and decentralized exchange arbitrage. We estimate that over 2 years, those trading activities yielded 28.80M USD in profit, divided among 5,084 unique addresses. While arbitrage and liquidations might appear benign, traders can front-run others, causing financial losses to competitors. To provide an example of a generalized trading bot, we show a simple yet effective automated transaction replay algorithm capable of replacing unconfirmed transactions without the need to understand the victim transactions' underlying logic. We estimate that our transaction replay algorithm could have yielded a profit of 51,688.33 ETH (17.60M USD) over 2 years on past blockchain data. We also find that miners do not broadcast 1.64% of their mined transactions and instead choose to mine them privately. Privately mined and non-shared transactions, cannot be front-run by other traders or miners. We show that the largest Ethereum mining pool performs arbitrage and seemingly tries to cloak its private transaction mining activities. We therefore provide evidence that miners already extract Miner Extractable Value (MEV), which could destabilize the blockchain consensus security, as related work has shown.
翻译:Bitcoin等没有放权的连锁链在金融服务中取得了优势。然而,对手却从分散式金融(DeFi)智能合同的组合中提取了货币价值。一些人将Etheinum同侪网络描述为黑暗森林,其中广播交易代表猎物,被普遍交易机器人吞噬。虽然交易(重新)订单和前期交易已知给用户带来损失,但我们量化了从链式提取值(BEV)中获取多少价值。我们系统化了一项交易,从分散式金融(DeFi)智能合同的组合中提取了货币价值。我们估计,在2年中,这些交易的利润为28.80亿美元,在5 084个独特的地址之间分配。尽管套利交易和清算可能是好的,但贸易商们可以正面运行其他交易,给竞争者带来财政损失。为了举一个普通交易的范例,我们展示了一个简单而有效的自动交易重算法,可以取代未经证实的交易,而无需理解受害人交易的基本逻辑。我们估计,我们的交易重算算算算算算了我们的交易可能已经产生利润28.80美元利润,而没有进行E-6833期交易。我们也展示了他们的平级交易。