Enter the Dark Forest: The Terrifying World of MEV and Flash Bots

“It’s no secret that the Ethereum blockchain is a highly adversarial environment. If a smart contract can be exploited for profit, it eventually will be. Some very smart people spend a lot of time examining contracts for vulnerabilities. But this unforgiving environment pales in comparison to the mempool. If the chain itself is a battleground, the mempool is something worse: a dark forest. In the Ethereum mempool live the apex predators. You call them “arbitrage bots.”