New research from the cryptocurrency wallet ZenGo has shed additional light on front-running attacks happening on the Ethereum blockchain.
First outlined in “Ethereum Is a Dark Forest,” DeFi investors Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos called attention to a variety of attacks by bots that were roving the Ethereum blockchain in search of prey.
The new report from ZenGo outlines how the researchers identified and isolated generalized front-running bots while evaluating their efficiency and how likely a transaction is to get hunted down, while also testing how to evade them.
“Front-running in general is not something new on Ethereum,” said Alex Manuskin, a blockchain researcher at ZenGo, who conducted the research. “The novelty here is that we looked at bots that seek any profit, even in contracts they have never seen before, and even if these contracts are quite complex, and perform several internal calls to other contracts.”
Front-running
The ZenGo report…