How Sandwich Bots Extracted Value from Every Stake on Bittensor
On Bittensor, for a certain period, every time a user staked/unstaked their tokens, a bot was ready to profit from it. It wasn't an exploit in the classic sense, no code vulnerability, no direct theft
alessiogiannini.dev6 min read
There are a large number of MEV bots operating on Bittensor. One notable characteristic is that all of these MEV bots interact through the EVM side. As soon as a block is finalized, they immediately submit an empty transaction to the mempool without specifying an amount or netuid.
When an MEV opportunity is detected in the following mempool, the transaction is finalized using the appropriate UID and amount while preserving its original position in the queue. This behavior is quite puzzling. It appears that current MEV bots are using a strategy in which they enrich or complete a transaction at confirmation time after it has already been placed in the mempool.
More recently, different types of MEV bots have emerged, including one-block MEV bots, latent (or dormant) MEV bots, and anti-MEV bots.
What are your thoughts on this? What mechanisms do you think these MEV bots are using, and how could they be mitigated or countered?