Another unicorn of web3 has shown itself this morning. The Block reported that Flashbots seeks up to $50 million at a billion-dollar valuation. It is definitely well-deserved due to its contribution to Ethereum. The existence and popularity of Flashbots Auction bring fierce competition to Sandwich searchers, thus crushing the profit of Sandwich chefs for a long time. Our data shows that, in the past 30 days, 82.5K sandwich MEVs created $845.5K profit out of a cost of $4.7M. The overall ROI is 18.1%.

At block number 23545404 (Dec-02–2022 12:43:18 AM +UTC) on BSC, an attacker successfully packaged a transaction on-chain targeting the liquid staking protocol Ankr’s Deployer contract, in which the reward-bearing token aBNBc was suddenly minted at an amount of 10 trillion and transferred to the attacker’s address 0xf3a4.

Curve is a DEX liquidity pool built on Ethereum and launched in 2020. It is also known for StableSwap, a feature dedicated to creating an ecosystem that allows users to exchange stablecoins with other DEX protocols with lower fees and slippage.

We have presented you with the story of the $CRV short saga, of which we focused on the details of liquidation transactions and liquidators. This time, in the research report we will share with you, we’d like to put on the hat of financial researchers to dissect the event using a thorough analysis of token flows.

Photo by Harry Gillen on Unsplash

Ignorance is the parent of fear. — — Moby Dick

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) has already become a central topic in 2022, not very long since the original notion was proposed. MEV is also regarded as permissionless incentives in blockchains, extractable on a first-come basis. However, the attractive wealth opportunities in the dark forest are also hard-to-discover and require specialized capabilities. These facts raise concerns about public issues within Ethereum’s ecosystem, from the block congestion problem caused by Priority Gas Auction (PGA) to more critical security issues due to possible vulnerabilities among the validators and block builders.

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