Now that sniping bots are running for cover at the first site of 111PG protection, we’re tackling other malicious bot problems, starting with two really big ones: front-running and sandwich attacks.
Now that sniping bots are running for cover at the first site of 111PG protection, we’re tackling other malicious bot problems, starting with two really big ones: front-running and sandwich attacks.
Background
Ever had someone cut in line to get that last pair of limited edition Air Jordans or that last ticket to see your favorite band? Sucks, right? Frontrunning is exactly that but with the mining block of a blockchain. A frontrunner essentially bribes the miner to cut in line (and/or uses a bot to do the same). But they’re not doing it just to spite you.
They’re going after lucrative tokens or desirable NFTs early so they can pump the price and dump them on those who play fair, aka the suckers, aka you and me. It’s unfair and against the spirit of crypto.
Sandwich attacks are doubly worse because it’s both a frontrunning and a backrunning attack. It starts when a bot notices a large order for a particular token. Large orders move the token price, especially if going through an AMM like Uniswap. Knowing that the big order will move the price up, the bot enters its own order at a slightly higher gas price to buy the token before the person being frontrun. Blockchain being public, the bot can see how high the original person is willing to pay (slippage tolerance) and so can predict how far that trade will drive up the price.
Of course, there are now two trades driving up the price: first the bot trade and then the originally intended “sucker’s” trade. With the price now inflated, the bot sells its tokens, which returns the price back to normal level.
All of a sudden, the person who ordered the trade seeing the initial low price bought at a higher price and now see a new low price on the market (aka, is sitting on a paper loss). The bot bought the tokens much closer to the initial low price and sold them at a much higher price — and is sitting on a profit.
Done enough times with enough volume, sandwich attacks make millions for the bots and hurt thousands of regular traders who saw a good price but ended up paying a bad one. Doubly unfair.
Needless to say, this victimizes loyal community members who end up essentially paying a premium to these malicious bots. It hurts community trust in the token and the team. Obviously, this hurts natural price discovery as well. Moreover, it’s a stain on the whole blockchain industry and gives fuel to those who ignorantly or maliciously seize on any excuse to criticize crypto as fraudulent and purely speculative.
Our defense
You’d think that the best way would be to block sandwich bots from their initial frontrunning transaction. But that is both technically nearly impossible, opens up new vulnerabilities, and not nearly as fun as what we’re doing: delaying the bot’s second transaction, the one to sell the tokens at an inflated price. When the bot can finally sell those tokens several blocks later, the price may already return to a lower level forcing the bot to sell at a loss.
This possibility makes the creator of a bot think twice: is my capital worth the risk?
Since the whole idea of such bots is to near-guarantee a small profit every time over and over again, the possibility of losing money doesn’t really fit into their business model. In short: we tell them that it’s not worth messing with the project 111PG is protecting. Same message we’ve been successfully sending to sniping bots for a while now. Btw, same for simple frontrunning attacks — if a bot can’t flip the token quickly, its creator will think twice about committing resources to buying it.
Big deal
As far as we know, there is nothing like this on the market. We already have a history of success im protecting projects from sniping bots. We have proven ourselves technologically in the actual market. All of our pending clients are automatically a great fit for this new protection as well as great word-of-mouth advertising to others.
In essence, this is another step in firmly establishing 111PG as the protection service for crypto projects.
And once we launch our Accelerator, Launchpad, and more… just buckle in and hold onto your seats!
