Theft-as-a-Service on Ethereum
Predatory trading is a growing threat in both traditional and cryptocurrency exchanges. Some aspects of these behaviors have been popularized in the news, such as in the recent downfall of FTX and its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. These however, only tell part of the story of fraud and theft that regularly occur within the most popular cryptocurrencies. Under less public scrutiny has been the unethical monetary extraction, which is occurring trade-by-trade in cryptocurrencies, and the ad-hoc solutions designed to ameliorate their negative consequences. One such solution, the Flashbots project was created to address the negative externalities associated with some types of predatory trading in cryptocurrency exchanges, specifically, frontrunning on Ethereum. With a market cap of nearly 150 billion USD, Ethereum is the second-most valuable cryptocurrency in the world. In Q3 2022, Ethereum saw over 16 million active users. Anyone can make an account in Ethereum for free using a well-known procedure not much more complicated than generating a public key pair.
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