Flash Boy’s Gain, Everybody’s Pain: 2022 Mid-Year Report of Sandwich MEV on Ethereum
There is no new thing under the sun. -- Ecclesiastes 1:9
Sandwich MEV is no news in TradFi, which has been dealing with High-frequency trading (HFT) since the 1930s. However, the publishing of the paper Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning in Decentralized Exchanges, Miner Extractable Value, and Consensus Instability, gave the DeFi communities a glossary to discuss the impacts and pulled the curtain to examine frontrunning’s strategies and techniques.
To make the situation more transparent to the public, EigenPhi compiled Flash Boy’s Gain, Everybody’s Pain: 2022 Mid-Year Report of Sandwich MEV on Ethereum. This is the first comprehensive revealing of the whole supply chain of Sandwich attacks. Our goal is to help achieve what Michael Lewis said in the Epilogue, Riding the Wall Street Trail, of his book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt:
The red barn had been built in the round so that mice had no corners in which to hide. “People don’t know how to live in a world that is transparent,” Brad Katsuyama had said, and mice were probably no better at it.
Here are the key takeaways from the report.
182,246 sandwiches caused traders to lose $87.7M in total in the first six months of 2022, which brings $17.85M as profit to searchers.
Some of the searchers also had been victims of sandwiches.
Most of the sandwiches' ROI had been between 20% to 40%.
There were only 168 sandwich attacker EOAs, 130 Bots used by the EOAs, and 212 combinations of EOA & Bot being used by searchers, which breaks the myth that searchers would use many EOAs to disguise their identities.
Both EOAs and Bots were centralized regarding making sandwiches, causing loss, and profit.
Uniswap V3 is the most significant protocol that searchers have exploited.
Compared to the 168 EOAs belonging to the attackers, 72,351 victim EOAs got sandwiched and lost $87.7M.
Most of the victim's loss was between $50 and $500.
Many protocol-deployers and 5 Gitcoin grants had fallen victim to the prey.
Some famous names also suffered front-running attacks, i.e., Tetranode.
Top 10 Miners had been accepting sandwiches, accounting for 70% of the total numbers, 72% of the total victim loss/attacker revenue, and 72% of the total profit.
To help you better navigate all the EOAs, Bots, protocols, routers, and proxies mentioned in the report. All these addresses can be clicked with more data for further investigation.
To read the full report, you can download it here. Alternatively, you can read the web version. And please let us know what you think via the channels below: