🚨 New paper alert 🚨 No Place to Hide: An Analysis on Protected Order Flow Sandwich Attacks w/ Ozan Solmaz @boez95 @ChristofTorres Bots watch every pending trade in Ethereum's public mempool and sandwich the ones worth attacking. Hence the nickname: the dark forest. In response, Ethereum and other chains built protections, from private RPCs to mechanisms native to the chain, that shield trades from these bots. We call this protected order flow. How well are these users actually protected? We measured it in a three-year study of sandwich attacks by persistent bots against protected order flow on Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Base, Arbitrum, and Monad. The protections on these chains range from private RPCs on Ethereum and private submission to a centralized sequencer on Base and Arbitrum, to first-come-first-served ordering in Tron's public mempool and local mempools on Solana and Monad. Local mempools were never meant as a full front-running prevention, but they do limit who sees a trade before it lands. On four of the six chains, we observe protected order flow sandwich attacks: 28.0M attacks on Solana, 38,567 on Tron, 30,607 on Ethereum plus 2,576 more through reorged blocks, and 1,889 on Base. We trace each chain's exposure and find that it sits in various places along a transaction’s path. 🟠 Ethereum: OFAs can expose enough information to make private trades sandwichable, especially when the same transaction reaches multiple OFAs or when searchers receive full transaction details. Reorged blocks also expose private transactions. We find transactions that were private and untouched in a block that got reorged, and then sandwiched on the canonical chain. 🟠 Solana: transactions are sent to the upcoming leaders, and early on we find that a few leaders carry far more attacks in their blocks than their share of blocks, i.e., they are likely the exposure source for these transactions. From 2025 that fades, but we see that victims concentrate around a few apps. 🟠 Tron: we presume that bots win latency races in the public mempool, so the first-come-first-served ordering in block building does not fully prevent sandwiches. 🟠 Base: we see two different kind of exposure. One lines up with a documented RPC bug that exposed pending transactions. The other has attackers preying on victims who trade on a predictable schedule, if the vicim does the same trade every couple of blocks, the attacker can front-run them without observing the pending trade. Protected order flow sandwiches look very different from public mempool sandwiches. The attacker's transactions often land in a different block than the victim's, and unlike in the public mempool, their success is not guaranteed. These attackers simply don't act with the same certainty. The dark forest may have shrunk, but we show there's an even darker corner of it, where users who think they're protected still get front-run. Protection has to hold at every layer, from the app to the RPC to the block producer. Encrypted mempools and TEE-based designs can help, by keeping transaction contents out of attackers' reach until inclusion. But even they might not be enough on their own without privacy, for example if the victim is too predictable. Link: arxiv.org/abs/2609.28115

Glad to see that Ethereum L1 will have a new strong prediction market contender that is dedicated to decentralization, and being ethical and not corposlop, and to actually trying to do interesting and meaningful things with this class of economic primitive. firefly.social/post/x/210212…

Open onchain data built a generation of analysts, including myself. It’s time to give back. We need an Onchain Data Foundation: > Onchain data education > Sustainable access to tools like Dune for upcoming analysts How do we fund this and who wants to help build it?

We published a (very!) detailed snapshot of our thinking on Hegotá priorities. You’ll hear me continue to discuss faster ethereum and faster blocks in the coming weeks, we think this is a critical one to get done here.

The thing I don't like most about cutting issuance discource is lack of positive vision for Ethereum validator set. Original design was not prescient enough, but has clear design goals: hundreds of thousands of individual stakers, running Ethereum all across the world. Status quo proponents also have a version of positive vision - e.g. Lido has built community staking, is decentralizing and geographically distributing validator set. We're successfully making a staking protocol that can bring Ethereum closer to original goals via opinionated, non-neutral decisions that base protocol can't adopt. Cutting is just "do it or it's going to get worse", no clear vision of good validator set we're solving for. They're given up on original vision, but don't want to clearly admit it and offer a new one.

🚨 New EIP: Tapered Issuance Burn We just submitted an EIP to ethereum/EIPs: a minimal, market-driven fix to Ethereum's issuance policy removing the incentive for stake growth beyond 50% of ETH supply. EIP-8361 by @pintail_xyz, @jdetychey, @dapplion, @pa7x1, @ladislaus0x & @drakefjustin 🧵

Please join us for MEV-SBC '26 tomorrow! 📍 Thursday, July 30, 9:30 AM @ Stanford This annual workshop highlights the past year of MEV research and surfaces problems worth exploring next in cryptography, mechanism design, data, P2P, consensus, incentives, and their intersections

“I said to YOU to never sell your Bitcoin. I never said that THE COMPANY wouldn’t sell its Bitcoin.” Jesus Christ.

We are now live with a @titanbuilderxyz compatible propAMM maker quote update web-socket. Please see our documentation at docs.quasar.win/propamm/make… More to come soon as we start to bring on more market makers and volume!