Over the past few weeks we have been looking for some information about the MEV robot. Today, we will sort out and share this knowledge with you.

First of all, we still need to briefly understand: What is a MEV robot?

The full name of MEV is Miner Extractable Value, which translates as miner extractable value. It is any automated interaction that we can have on the blockchain that has a positive expected value. It is not speculation on asset prices, a Ponzi-like liquidity mining protocol, or any traditional investment strategy. To put it simply, MEV is to DeFi what HFT (High-Frequency Trading) is to the stock market.

In our previous article, we introduced jaredfromsubway.eth, who should be considered the owner of the most successful MEV robot in the world. To date, his bots have carried out a total of 238,000 attacks (transactions), with more than 106,000 victims.

It can be said that the MEV robot is like a kitchen knife, with both advantages and disadvantages in using it.

Seeing this, you may be thinking: It sounds a bit complicated, so how did they launch the attack?

In fact, the core attack method of the MEV robot is Sandwiching, which is the so-called sandwich attack that you may have heard of. It is also the most notorious form of MEV attack. In plain words, this attack method is equivalent to the preemptive strategy adopted by high-frequency trading companies.

In the DeFi field, sandwich attacks are often severely criticized and regarded as a cancer that affects the healthy development of DeFi.

But in fact, as far as Sandwiching itself is concerned, rationally, we should still divide it into the good and bad aspects and look at it dialectically.

If we look at it from a bad perspective:

The Sandwich Attack should really be considered a pure trading exploitation strategy that targets uninformed retail traders who do not fully understand the underlying network dynamics of the blockchain and the implications of the slippage parameters they set when trading. For example, regular users who want to be one of the first buyers of a newly launched shitcoin and set their slippage to an absurdly high value (sometimes up to 99%) are vulnerable to Sandwich Attacks.

But if we look at it from a good perspective:

For example, if we look at this behavior purely from the perspective of economic efficiency, the operator of the sandwich robot seems to be working to bring the economic system (token price) to equilibrium. This ensures that the market meets consumers’ maximum willingness to pay while also extracting value for operators. Therefore, from this perspective, the existence of sandwich attacks seems reasonable. Although their purpose is still self-profit.

So, can we avoid the sandwich attack?

The answer is that it cannot be avoided, and sandwich attacks will always exist.

That is to say, if you don’t run the MEV robot, then someone else will. This is a profit-driven behavior, and as long as there is a market, this behavior will exist. Moreover, this practice is actually very common in the stock market and is a recognized behavior. No one thinks that the stock market is unreasonable because of this.

So, even now, as I write this, this front-running behavior continues to happen...

But now there seems to be a new solution to the above problem. Perhaps, you may have heard of FlashBot before. Simply put, FlashBot is also a bot, but a bot that can hide transactions from MEV bots.

Currently, there seems to be a "war" going on between the two robots, MEV and FlashBots.

Okay, the above is all the content shared through "Hua Li Huawai" today. Let’s summarize and review together at the end. This article mainly briefly introduces the concepts of MEV robots and sandwich attacks. I hope today’s sharing can be helpful to everyone.

Special thanks to: belizardd, 0xTHades

Disclaimer: The above content is only a personal perspective and analysis. It is only for science learning and communication among enthusiasts and does not constitute any investment advice. Investment is risky, please treat it rationally, increase risk awareness, and abide by the relevant laws and regulations of the country and region where you are located!