Flashbots Protect

Block Builders
1

Does the Flashbots Protect Product protect against sandwich and frontrunning attacks from the Flashbots network?

According to the docs:

At a high level these are some of the major benefits of integrating Flashbots Protect:

Frontrunning protection: transactions will not be seen by hungry sandwich bots in the public mempool.
No failed transactions: transactions will only be included if it doesn't include any reverts, so users don't pay for failed transactions. Note: transactions could be included in uncled blocks, emitted to the mempool, and then included on-chain.
Etherscan integration: users can see the status of their transactions on Etherscan.

But, we also know that Flashbots auction auctions off MEV opportunities.

Is it such that Flashbots protects against the public mempool but not the private Flashbots mempool?

Or is there something else going on that I’m not understanding?

2

Yes, transactions sent through Flashbots Protect are not seen by bots either in the public mempool or the Flashbots private mempool. So they are protected against both.

No bots can see inside the private Flashbots mempool.

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3

Thanks for the feedback! Very cool, so what’s the incentive for flashbots to run this endpoint, is it a goodwill endpoint?

Why wouldn’t everyone just use Flashbots Protect or a “protect-like” endpoint, and not broadcast transactions to a public mempool?

4

Flashbots primary focus is to enable a permissionless, transparent, and fair ecosystem for MEV extraction. So there is no incentive for flashbots to run this endpoint.

It’s mostly user preference.

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5

Thanks for the context. Would there be a downside to not broadcasting transactions? I guess the downside would be that your tx has a MUCH smaller chance of not being included if you only have it on your own node?

6

Just following up here. I still don’t understand.

According to the flashbots docs, it says:

Flashbots Protect makes it easy for everyday users and developers to use Flashbots for frontrunning protection.

However, it goes on to say:

We abstract away the complexity of submitting bundles to the Flashbots Auction and make integrating as simple as adding a URL to MetaMask.

This makes me think it’ll protect me from public sandwich and front-running bots, but not flashbots sandwich and front-running bots.

It then goes on to say that all transactions are sent the the MEV-Share node.

Flashbots Protect users’ transactions automatically flow to the Flashbots MEV-Share Node, which returns them up to 90% of the MEV that their transactions create.

Which makes me think, “ok, clearly Flashbot protect is not protecting me from MEV… what gives?”

Do I have that correct?

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7

Well, only selective data is shared by the MEV-Share node. Enough to enable e.g. blind arbitrage, but not enough to enable sandwiching. So users are protected from sandwiching but still can benefit from being backrun.

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8

Thank you for the feedback @PatrickAlphaC – I just watched your video and read the thread you posted regarding Flashbots Protect.

Great tutorial, and very valuable feedback on the Protect docs. We’ll update the overview page for Protect based on your feedback to clarify that MEV-Share only allow for backrunning, The 90% MEV users might receive is from searchers executing transactions after you to clear out arbitrage opportunities.

If you have additional feedback, thoughts, ideas or questions – please let us know, it is very much appreciated!

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9

Of course! Thank you for making this product!

Glad the video was helpful! If you think of other cool ways to bring exposure to this product, let me know!

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