A rather regular afternoon was interrupted by a message in the flashbots discord. I sometimes check out messages there and see if someone needs help recovering funds. This time the message seemed quite urgent. The victim was losing tens of thousands of dollars by the minute. …

Ethereum dark forest monsters are no joke. These frontrunning bots can analyze smart contract calls and functions they have never used before in smart contracts they’ve never seen to extract potential profits. To better understand these bots, we set out on a safari tour to shed more light on the…

TL;DR; DeFi lending protocols power many of today’s yield farming ventures and are considered a relatively safe and tested way to make extra income on crypto-assets. With interest in these protocols on the rise, we thought it’s an excellent time to provide a more detailed write up to help people…

In a recent tweet that gained some popularity, we described the curious tale of Jhon Doe [sic]. …

Dune Analytics is a powerful tool for blockchain research. It can be used to query, extract, and visualize vast amounts of data on the Ethereum blockchain. This post goes over some basic examples of how to search and write basic queries as well as visualize them with graphs. …

TL;DR: As it turns out, “general front-running arbitrage bots” that can steal earning opportunities on the Ethereum blockchain, which were only thought to be theoretically possible, are indeed very real. The existence of such bots proves once more that arbitrage trading is a game for professionals, not amateurs. By Alex…

Decentralized finances create an interesting dynamic of auctions. Arbitrage and liquidation opportunities are examples of auctions where the first player to make the bid can make a healthy profit. This creates a race where multiple bots spam the transaction pool, competing for a good spot in the block. It is…

Optimization is fun. When it comes to laptops, one of those things you can never have too much of is battery life. Although modern Linux distributions are doing a great job improving on this aspect, using some well known and some less known tools, battery life and performance can be…

As part of our ongoing research on blockchains, we were able to spot some highly abnormal Ethereum transactions (Tx) early on. We’re referring to two recent transactions that led to millions of dollars in network fees being paid unnecessarily, instead of standard fees, that are usually less than $1. …