Analyzing Mev Techniques

Last updated on August 8, 2022

This document is old and more of a scratchpad. Notes below may be incorrect.

Glossary

https://etherscan.io/tx//advanced
https://etherscan.io/txsInternal?a=&&m=advanced
Go to page w/ block in question, look at transactions around the of interest
https://etherscan.io/tx/#statechange (can also see miner direct payouts; or if a miner made this transaction)

0x78A55B9b3BBEffB36A43D9905F654d2769dC55e8

Bot smart contract: 0x78A55B9b3BBEffB36A43D9905F654d2769dC55e8 (#0x78A)
- Sometimes it wins and sometimes it loses
EOA that triggers the withdrawals: 0xF46b0BDfB89B704D09AcF3AE722a49db0C7efe8B (#0xF46)
- This contract triggers the #0x78A bot contract to send withdrawals to a subset (3 + 1) EOA tx issuer accounts (example)
- Withdrawals happens every ~1 day
EOA tx issuers: 0x3F6349708CB72750fFAF7F69fae94718b983de39, 0x55f6b9cb4CcF714BEc345a95DF3d1460Bc9d35Cb, … (many of them)
- Their ETH balances never go above 2 ETH (hard threshold?). Usually stays above 1 ETH.
Strategy
- Standard arbitrage, usually after a big trade, pays gas
- Sometimes splits MEV and pays no gas

Misclassification. This is a 0x-based trade that filled the order via “the best price” under the hood across multiple exchanges (see also matcha.xyz).

An arbitrage opportunity created due to a “big” trade. These opportunities cascade through exchanged until the price equilizes.

#0x78a –> #0xd0d SS(WETH –> SAITAMA) –> #0x78a –> #0x9cb USV2(SAITAMA –> WETH) –> #0x78a
$17 in gas fees, $330 in revenue
Seems a rookie mistake to route back to #0x78a instead of going directly to USV2
SS pair was proceeded by a $6.7k trade
It was the first trade on USV2
Odd: state change says #0x002 (a miner) was paid 0.007 ETH, but that’s not shown in the decompilation (?)

A clean arbitrage of $1375 USD in profit. Didn’t pay any gas or eth for this, but it ends with 3 suicides. Perhaps gas reclaimed from that(?) (double check this)

Miner finding the arbitrage and paying themselves. As a result no tx fees. Profit of about $50 USD. (double check this)

Transaction from 0xdfee68a9adb981cd08699891a11cabe10f25ec44 team
#0xdfee –> #0x9cbf UNIV2(WETH –> SAITAMA) –> #0xd0dc SHIBASWAP(SAITAMA –> WETH) –> #0xdfee
$40 revenue, $8 tx fee
Burned gas tokens to keep fees low
- Does pay miner directly, so gas token burning may actually be to reduce slots used in the tx to encourage miner to include it at no loss
Opportunity was created from a $124 trade right before on the uniswap pair (only 2 transactions on that pair in the block, ShibaSwap had 1 transaction in that block)

Another transaction from 0xdfee68a9adb981cd08699891a11cabe10f25ec44 team
#0xdfe ($1455) –> UNIV2 GALA –> #0x000 –> UNIV3 GALA –> #0xdfe ($1546)
$100 revenue, “$0” tx fee due to using gas tokens
This was the first UNIV2 GALA trade on the block, subsequent transactions are getReserves checks from other bots(?); this bot got in first
Opportunity looks like it was opened from the first trade on this block of UNIV3 GALA ($5k worth of GALA –> ETH), this bot was the second trade that came in just after. Subsequent transactions are getReserves checks from other bots(?); this bot got in first

Split profits w/ miner (miner took 48 ETH, they took 5 ETH); they took exactly 10%, and gave 90% to miner
70 ETH -(SS)-> 197k YGG -(UV3)-> USDC -(UV3)-> 123 ETH

A sandwich attack, made ~0.033 ($95 CAD), gave a 0.01 ETH to miner. Misreported on MEV Explorer. Oddly combines a swap between Sushi and Uniswap as well.

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