Ordinals Marketplaces Battle to Offer Best Mempool Sniping Protection

Mempool sniping has become such a serious issue among Ordinals traders that marketplaces are now vying to offer the best possible protection.

Magic Eden is gearing up to roll out its Sniping Prevention feature, which will likely require additional signatures and more coordination between the marketplace and a mining pool. Meanwhile, its competitor Mintify isn’t getting left behind. The company revealed a private mempool product which will bring “stealth transactions” and claims it will block out snipers with complete privacy.

A third company still in private beta after raising $7.6 million in August, Satflow, has become a go-to for Bitcoin Ordinals power users and has also been testing a range of preventive mechanisms for months.

For the uninitiated, mempool sniping is a form of transaction front-running enabled on Bitcoin by the arrival of Ordinals. Opportunistic snipers take advantage of transactions queuing in Bitcoin’s mempool by front-running trades to ensure they are the winning bidders. Users do not lose any money in these attacks, but they do make it nearly impossible for less sophisticated traders to win offers for Ordinals and Runes tokens.

The protective features are much needed.

“Mempool sniping has been an issue for a long time,” Jake Gallen, CEO of NFT interoperability company Emblem Vault, told The Defiant. “It generally affects hot mints and high-value assets, and now teams are countering these tools with their anti-sniping tools.”

According to Gallen, no projects have succeeded yet in combating sniping, mostly because they’ve been focused on the opposite. “More teams have been focused on selling sniping tooling than building preventative infrastructure,” he said. “It takes more resources to accomplish the latter.”

Which Mechanism Is Best?

The three companies take a slightly different approach to protecting traders.

Magic Eden hasn’t completely rolled out its anti-sniping mechanism, but Ordinals expert and CEO of Bioniq, an Ordinals marketplace, Bob Bodily, explained the solution. Purchases continue to be non-custodial atomic swaps, but are now split in three transactions. Bodily added that the overall cost to purchase an Ordinal will likely remain the same as it is now.

Meanwhile, Mintify is betting on private mempools, which allow transactions to go directly to a pool instead of being publicly broadcasted. The pool only includes the transaction whenever it finds a block – bypassing any potential sniping.

The latest company to come out and try to grab market share in the Ordinals space, Satflow, offers a similar mechanism to that of Magic Eden. It has a three-transaction technique, with advanced transaction construction and broadcasting capabilities – that also offers quick-timed cancellation or delisting of assets, even while unconfirmed.

Ordinals have taken the Bitcoin world by storm, and builders are experimenting to a degree not seen before in years. Mempool sniping protection is just the first of many features yet to come.