Frontrunner Jones and the Raiders of the Dark Forest: An Empirical Study of Frontrunning on the Ethereum Blockchain
This research quantifies the financial impact and prevalence of frontrunning for users and developers within the Ethereum ecosystem, highlighting a significant security and fairness concern.
This paper empirically studies frontrunning on the Ethereum blockchain, identifying nearly 200,000 attacks across 11 million blocks. These attacks resulted in an accumulated profit of $18.41 million for the attackers, demonstrating that frontrunning is a prevalent and lucrative issue.
Ethereum prospered the inception of a plethora of smart contract applications, ranging from gambling games to decentralized finance. However, Ethereum is also considered a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerable smart contracts will eventually be exploited. Recently, Ethereum's pool of pending transaction has become a far more aggressive environment. In the hope of making some profit, attackers continuously monitor the transaction pool and try to frontrun their victims' transactions by either displacing or suppressing them, or strategically inserting their transactions. This paper aims to shed some light into what is known as a dark forest and uncover these predators' actions. We present a methodology to efficiently measure the three types of frontrunning: displacement, insertion, and suppression. We perform a large-scale analysis on more than 11M blocks and identify almost 200K attacks with an accumulated profit of 18.41M USD for the attackers, providing evidence that frontrunning is both, lucrative and a prevalent issue.