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 understanding 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 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等没有自由的连锁链在金融服务中表现得非常出色。然而,对手却从分散金融(DeFi)智能合同的组合中提取货币价值。一些人将Etheum同侪网络称为黑暗森林,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,但我们量化了从连锁提取值(BEV)中获取多少价值。我们系统化了一个交易,命令从分权金融(DeFi)智能合同中提取货币价值。我们估计,在2年多的时间里,这些交易的利润为28.80亿美元,分成5,084个独有的地址。尽管套套利交易和清算可能看上去良好,但贸易商贩们可以正面操纵其他交易,给竞争者带来财政损失。我们展示了一个简单而有效的自动交易重算算算法,可以取代未经证实的交易,而没有理解受害者交易的基本逻辑。我们估计,我们的交易重算算算算交易本,我们的交易重算出了51,68.33的利润中,这些交易产生利润价值。我们也选择了20年的铁矿交易。