fknmarqu🥪 MEV Monitor: Solana Sandwich Attacks
Table of ContentsIntroductiontl;drThe Financial Impact: Quantifying the Drain & Costs 3.1 Overall Scale of Value Extraction 3.2 Attacker Economics: Costs vs. Profitability 3.3 User Costs: Direct Losses and Transaction Fees 3.4 Temporal Impact Trends 3.5 Summary of Financial ImplicationsWho & How: The Attacker Landscape & Strategies 4.1 The Dual Challenge: Attribution & Ecosystem Complexity 4.2 Attacker Economics as a Behavioral Proxy 4.3 Diverse Execution Methods & Infrastructure Insights 4.4...
fknmarquUniswap v3 Gas ⛽️
When using a smart contract blockchain, users have to pay a fee to miners/validators so they include their transaction into the next block to get executed. The fee is called gas and how much of it you need to pay depends on the complexity of the transaction. But while the amount of gas needed for a contract remains constant over time, the price of gas does not, being subject to market forces of supply and demand. *While there is more to say on the subject of gas, Etherscan says it better. In ...
fknmarquWho's onboarding Solana users?
I think we all have a feeling that Solana keeps on growing as an ecosystem and users continue to join the blockchain. But how are users actually getting onboarded? And how many of them stick around? In this report we will look at three categories users can interact with and follow their retention rates over the course of 6 weeks. These categories are:ProgramsNFTsTokensA quick note on new users: we’re considering an address to be new if it did not make any transaction in the respective categor...
fknmarqu🥪 MEV Monitor: Solana Sandwich Attacks
Table of ContentsIntroductiontl;drThe Financial Impact: Quantifying the Drain & Costs 3.1 Overall Scale of Value Extraction 3.2 Attacker Economics: Costs vs. Profitability 3.3 User Costs: Direct Losses and Transaction Fees 3.4 Temporal Impact Trends 3.5 Summary of Financial ImplicationsWho & How: The Attacker Landscape & Strategies 4.1 The Dual Challenge: Attribution & Ecosystem Complexity 4.2 Attacker Economics as a Behavioral Proxy 4.3 Diverse Execution Methods & Infrastructure Insights 4.4...
fknmarquUniswap v3 Gas ⛽️
When using a smart contract blockchain, users have to pay a fee to miners/validators so they include their transaction into the next block to get executed. The fee is called gas and how much of it you need to pay depends on the complexity of the transaction. But while the amount of gas needed for a contract remains constant over time, the price of gas does not, being subject to market forces of supply and demand. *While there is more to say on the subject of gas, Etherscan says it better. In ...
fknmarquWho's onboarding Solana users?
I think we all have a feeling that Solana keeps on growing as an ecosystem and users continue to join the blockchain. But how are users actually getting onboarded? And how many of them stick around? In this report we will look at three categories users can interact with and follow their retention rates over the course of 6 weeks. These categories are:ProgramsNFTsTokensA quick note on new users: we’re considering an address to be new if it did not make any transaction in the respective categor...
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So you’ve stumbled upon a dashboard. It says it is MEGA and it takes a bit of scrolling to be done with it. Well, if you ever wanted a single place where you can go and get a high level view of the Polygon PoS Blockchain, now you have it.
The Polygon MEGA Dashboard:
https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/polygon-mega-dash-sDWVCY
Sure, it contains a lot of information and aims to answer a few questions about the performance of the blockchain as well as the activity on it. It meets this goal (if I can say so myself) but it cannot include the answer to all the questions you ever had. So chill.
The heart monitor of Polygon. You’ll spend some time with it so let’s walk through it together for the first time. The timeframe_months we’ll use is set to 6.
There are a few sections dedicated to the core elements of any blockchain:
Transactions
Gas
Blocks
Users
PoS Bridge
*Note about data: The legacy Polygon tables used for this dashboard currently have a large number of missing blocks on two time intervals: June 1-10 and July 1-5. The gaps will either be backfilled in the current tables, or the new ones will be used as more historical data gets added to them.
They’re of two kinds: successful and not that successful. Over the observed period, Polygon had a somewhat constant failure rate around 6% despite the wide range of transactions count on a daily basis.
The donuts on the side will help to keep track and compare the success rate of transactions on shorter vs longer periods.
Polygon advertises transaction speeds of up to 7,000 TPS, but over the last three months we can only see maximum values of under 2,000 TPS, with a much lower daily average ranging between 50-10 TPS.
Bad sign? Not at all. Current counts leave a lot of room for new activity to hop on the blockchain without surging costs. The network also seems to achieve significantly lower Fail Rates as the TPS values increase, while at the same time having a greater change of high Fail Rates.
*If you don’t know anything about Gas, read from the experts at Etherscan. Yes, gas follows the same logic on Polygon.
Gas is a tricky one. With new blocks being added at a somewhat constant rate, transactions often get evenly distributed and therefore gas prices don’t have to spike. We can see the daily gas as well as average gas per block staying in pretty reliable ranges over the last three months.
What we can tell from this part of the Gas section is that Polygon does live up to the promise of cheap(er) transactions and a viable scaling solution for the notoriously congested Ethereum blockchain. At the same time, Polygon has created a constant stream of revenue in the form of collected fees to its network of validators, further encouraging and retaining participants in the ecosystem.
On shorter time frames the chart might indicate a slightly different curve, but as always a larger number of observations will bring us closer to the actual curve. Below we can see that gas prices naturally increase by the amount of gas per block but after the 30M mark they actually start going down. As long as blocks don’t meet their maximum capacity, there is no need for prices to surge and everyone is happy.
On the other hand, we can see quite high gas prices when there is not that much gas being used per block. Further research is needed on that end to determine whether this is by design or the result of network events.
In this section we can also see for the selected time frame when have been the highest average gas demands and prices during weekly cycles. Use it to stay safe and avoid paying an unnecessary price.
A lot of DeFi protocols migrated to Polygon to offer their users a faster, less expensive experience when using their products. We can see among the top Gas Guzzlers the usual culprits of Ethereum, such as Aave, OpenSea, Curve and Sushiswap, but by far the greatest guzzler is Hop Protocol.
Hop is an alternative to the PoS Bridge that unlike the native solution, enables the bridging of assets between a wide range of blockchains and L2s.
With the exception of the missing blocks period, we can see a somewhat constant number of blocks being created each day. The average sits just under 40k blocks per day.
Not all blocks are equal and that is visible by the time it takes a new one to be added, as well as the block size (number of transactions in a block).
The utilisation of a block refers to the amount of gas used compared to the limit (maximum) amount set by the transactions within a block.
The block utilisation rate sits a bit above the 40% mark but seems to be on a slight uptrend over the last month. Out of the daily gas limit however, only 20% of the gas a block would be able to process is actually being used (and paid).
Blocks are not only underutilised, but it often happens for empty blocks to be added to the chain as well. Between 1-2% of daily blocks are empty.
Users or addresses? We’re on a blockchain so we don’t know, but we will call them users for simplicity. What we do know is that Polygon still has a considerable amount of new users turning active on a daily basis and it does not seem to be winding down yet.
With an active user defined as an address that made at least one transaction in the last 90 days, we see Polygon having quite the population with over 5.4M users. It’s been on a slight decline compared to the start of the observed time frame, but nothing significant. Considering the market conditions and the increasing competition in the space, it’s quite remarkable.
Yes, it’s not the only bridge and by the looks of it Hop is quite strong competition just by itself. However, we are going to use only the native solution in order to keep things focused on the Polygon offer.
After having its peak activity in mid February, deposit and withdrawal volume have slowed down, currently being at its all time low. The size of individual transactions, regardless of their direction, has also decreased and continue to do so.
However, we’re not witnessing an exodus (at least not via the native bridge), with more funds being bridged to Polygon than away from it over the last 6 months.
Considering the increasing preference for stablecoins determined by the market conditions, it is unsurprising that assets such as USDC and DAI make up a lot of the bridge volume. More than a third of the deposit volume was generated by USDC.
In the case of withdrawals, more than a quarter of the volume was generated bridging ETH back to the Mainnet.
This section can be used not only to track a static preference for assets, but also to spot trends. For example the SAND token, being bridged in large volumes during early 2022, is now barely transiting the PoS Bridge in any direction.
A few more things to keep in mind:
The data is daily updated.
Charts are interactive, meaning that you can select and zoom into them.
Chart elements can be toggled ON/OFF by interacting with the legend.
Now go explore the data yourself. Have fun! ✌️
So you’ve stumbled upon a dashboard. It says it is MEGA and it takes a bit of scrolling to be done with it. Well, if you ever wanted a single place where you can go and get a high level view of the Polygon PoS Blockchain, now you have it.
The Polygon MEGA Dashboard:
https://app.flipsidecrypto.com/dashboard/polygon-mega-dash-sDWVCY
Sure, it contains a lot of information and aims to answer a few questions about the performance of the blockchain as well as the activity on it. It meets this goal (if I can say so myself) but it cannot include the answer to all the questions you ever had. So chill.
The heart monitor of Polygon. You’ll spend some time with it so let’s walk through it together for the first time. The timeframe_months we’ll use is set to 6.
There are a few sections dedicated to the core elements of any blockchain:
Transactions
Gas
Blocks
Users
PoS Bridge
*Note about data: The legacy Polygon tables used for this dashboard currently have a large number of missing blocks on two time intervals: June 1-10 and July 1-5. The gaps will either be backfilled in the current tables, or the new ones will be used as more historical data gets added to them.
They’re of two kinds: successful and not that successful. Over the observed period, Polygon had a somewhat constant failure rate around 6% despite the wide range of transactions count on a daily basis.
The donuts on the side will help to keep track and compare the success rate of transactions on shorter vs longer periods.
Polygon advertises transaction speeds of up to 7,000 TPS, but over the last three months we can only see maximum values of under 2,000 TPS, with a much lower daily average ranging between 50-10 TPS.
Bad sign? Not at all. Current counts leave a lot of room for new activity to hop on the blockchain without surging costs. The network also seems to achieve significantly lower Fail Rates as the TPS values increase, while at the same time having a greater change of high Fail Rates.
*If you don’t know anything about Gas, read from the experts at Etherscan. Yes, gas follows the same logic on Polygon.
Gas is a tricky one. With new blocks being added at a somewhat constant rate, transactions often get evenly distributed and therefore gas prices don’t have to spike. We can see the daily gas as well as average gas per block staying in pretty reliable ranges over the last three months.
What we can tell from this part of the Gas section is that Polygon does live up to the promise of cheap(er) transactions and a viable scaling solution for the notoriously congested Ethereum blockchain. At the same time, Polygon has created a constant stream of revenue in the form of collected fees to its network of validators, further encouraging and retaining participants in the ecosystem.
On shorter time frames the chart might indicate a slightly different curve, but as always a larger number of observations will bring us closer to the actual curve. Below we can see that gas prices naturally increase by the amount of gas per block but after the 30M mark they actually start going down. As long as blocks don’t meet their maximum capacity, there is no need for prices to surge and everyone is happy.
On the other hand, we can see quite high gas prices when there is not that much gas being used per block. Further research is needed on that end to determine whether this is by design or the result of network events.
In this section we can also see for the selected time frame when have been the highest average gas demands and prices during weekly cycles. Use it to stay safe and avoid paying an unnecessary price.
A lot of DeFi protocols migrated to Polygon to offer their users a faster, less expensive experience when using their products. We can see among the top Gas Guzzlers the usual culprits of Ethereum, such as Aave, OpenSea, Curve and Sushiswap, but by far the greatest guzzler is Hop Protocol.
Hop is an alternative to the PoS Bridge that unlike the native solution, enables the bridging of assets between a wide range of blockchains and L2s.
With the exception of the missing blocks period, we can see a somewhat constant number of blocks being created each day. The average sits just under 40k blocks per day.
Not all blocks are equal and that is visible by the time it takes a new one to be added, as well as the block size (number of transactions in a block).
The utilisation of a block refers to the amount of gas used compared to the limit (maximum) amount set by the transactions within a block.
The block utilisation rate sits a bit above the 40% mark but seems to be on a slight uptrend over the last month. Out of the daily gas limit however, only 20% of the gas a block would be able to process is actually being used (and paid).
Blocks are not only underutilised, but it often happens for empty blocks to be added to the chain as well. Between 1-2% of daily blocks are empty.
Users or addresses? We’re on a blockchain so we don’t know, but we will call them users for simplicity. What we do know is that Polygon still has a considerable amount of new users turning active on a daily basis and it does not seem to be winding down yet.
With an active user defined as an address that made at least one transaction in the last 90 days, we see Polygon having quite the population with over 5.4M users. It’s been on a slight decline compared to the start of the observed time frame, but nothing significant. Considering the market conditions and the increasing competition in the space, it’s quite remarkable.
Yes, it’s not the only bridge and by the looks of it Hop is quite strong competition just by itself. However, we are going to use only the native solution in order to keep things focused on the Polygon offer.
After having its peak activity in mid February, deposit and withdrawal volume have slowed down, currently being at its all time low. The size of individual transactions, regardless of their direction, has also decreased and continue to do so.
However, we’re not witnessing an exodus (at least not via the native bridge), with more funds being bridged to Polygon than away from it over the last 6 months.
Considering the increasing preference for stablecoins determined by the market conditions, it is unsurprising that assets such as USDC and DAI make up a lot of the bridge volume. More than a third of the deposit volume was generated by USDC.
In the case of withdrawals, more than a quarter of the volume was generated bridging ETH back to the Mainnet.
This section can be used not only to track a static preference for assets, but also to spot trends. For example the SAND token, being bridged in large volumes during early 2022, is now barely transiting the PoS Bridge in any direction.
A few more things to keep in mind:
The data is daily updated.
Charts are interactive, meaning that you can select and zoom into them.
Chart elements can be toggled ON/OFF by interacting with the legend.
Now go explore the data yourself. Have fun! ✌️
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