Recently, it has emerged that builders have started executing their own MEV strategies to compensate for the significant revenue impacts caused by the GWA.
The example reported involve this transaction, which generated a ~25.000$ arbitrage opportunity.
We are deeply concerned about this development and have some genuine questions:
What is preventing builders from simply frontrunning our own paths without running any path-finding algorithm or infrastructure?
We invest heavily in top-tier hardware and engineering to remain competitive — this effectively gets bypassed.
What is preventing builders from frontrunning our bribes since they know exactly the value we’re pushing?
Builders have visibility into our bribes and may exploit that knowledge.
Everyone is constrained by timing — how is this fair?
Submitting an arbitrage backrun near the block time results in zero inclusion, since builders must anticipate block submission by at least 100–200ms. In a fair competition, this arbitrage opportunity would roll over to the next block.
This appears to be another step toward centralization and could seriously impact many businesses and independent searchers.
As a searcher on BSC, I’m deeply concerned that builders are running their own MEV strategies and pushing out independent searchers like me. It’s a clear conflict of interest — they control block building and can use it to front-run or exclude our bundles.
In a fair market, builders should not compete with searchers. Either give searchers the right to propose full blocks, or enforce strict separation between building and searching.
Right now, they’re eating our bread. This isn’t a free market — it’s a monopoly.
Same concerns. Fairness is totally gone. We run a real business with end of month paychecks, we don’t do this just for fun. GWA already impacted a lot in everyone revenues from searchers to blockbuilders which are - obviously - forced to run their own stuff to survive.
It’s good to hear your voice, we all respect your talent and your work. But for your questions:
I don’t think any builder has copied or will copy your trading path, you definitely saw them this if ever happened, you have been using services for long time, it’s easy to find one copy trading.
2.Same as question one.
I think you all know where builders are , build your service near builder server, it’s the only way to reduce latency. We reduce our latency by that.
And I have two questions for you:
Does GWA influence our revenue or yours?
You guys are top searchers on BSC, I know GWA impact your revenue, of course we do because we try to prevent all sandwiches. You guys have earned 10 million from past sandwiches, but new game changes ,we all have to follow the game rules.
Should we open our private transaction for you? I know that’s what you care the most. But no I don’t think so, we got these private transaction users send to us, THEY ASK US TO KEEP THEM PRIVATE so we don’t allow any other third party to see this.How could we show these informations for you to do back-run?Everyone can promise us that they won’t front-run these transactions, but we are ultimately the ones responsible for user privacy, and the only ones we can trust are ourselves.
We believe no builders is copying our paths or frontrunning our bribes, but we also know how easy it is to break this trust even for certain opportunities happening once a year. Main concernes is all about timings and the ability/in-ability to backrun certain transactions (i.e bundles), which would shift in the next block as mentioned by OP. Nonetheless, as a proof of what the OP is claiming, we can all agree that the contracts from you and puissant are making numbers from regular arbitrages that no searcher on BSC has ever made in the history of the blockchain (not even close), kudos for that.
about questions:
As we discussed privately, in no way we have ever been close to make 10m with sandwiches.
Majority of sandwich profits came from bad bots or in general “code”, pump&dumps bots from github or other sandwich bots, definitely not from real users. Majority of those money was ending up with bribes much higher than 95%. Our stats speaks better then any fancy DUNE dashboard. Around 75% of transactions on each block are not going through public mempool and despite we know about many players that played this game (before your decision to stop broadcasting the full private orderflow), we never though for a minute to frontrun private orderflows. This is how we gained trust in this space and this is why certian builders are sharing private orderflows with us to backrun and they can still sleep like babies without worrying.
TLDR; yes, GWA impacted on our revenues. We were literally playing with those pump and dump bots, also disincentivizing this activity. Sandwiches a-part, we were used to submit colorful bundles chaining multiple transactions to create low-profit arbitragres which are now falsely marked as sandwich. At the end of the day, this was a good number that is gone.
To conclude (1), rules are changed but there is still one or more sandwich each block made by whose brave enough to push 22k non-atomically. I.E: BNB Smart Chain Transactions Information | BscScan
As I just mentioned replying (1), someone is already trusting us by sharing the private orderflow (it cant be hidden, everyone know that) without requiring any payment from us. Despite that, we aren’t able to compete. We simply stopped to push bribes and we resigned ourselves to take what’s left (what’s left is very small and probably due to the complexity of such opportunities).
The fact that anyone can promise you to don’t frontrun is a matter of trust but, as I said in the first lines, trust is easy to break the first time the milion dollar opportunity appear like a wild pikachu.
I also feel very unconfortable speaking about fairness when we (together with someone else) are having the privilege of seeing private orderflows for backrunning, but i do believe this is something that can be fixed by allowing anyone that can (1) proof the identity through a legal entity individual/company (2) take the responsability to refund real users in case of any damage and not just disappear with the bag.
Still, after all this nice talking, point number (3) from OP persist. Its near impossible, even by having an infra next to your builder to compete with someone that is building a block and appending backruns straight after any transaction/bundle and it’s going to be even worst after june 30. It is also impossible to start own block-building either because you must be part of the special circle or because IO of private orderflow from third parties will add a dalay that cannot be managed after the block time has been decupled.
That said, to remain 100% honest and consisten with my opinion, I respect what you and puissant did after the GWA (everything you did). I would do that as well. What I’m looking for is a solution for everyone that is making this for a living, that has paychecks to fill at the end of the month and that always contributed with fair principles providing tech knowledge and help whenever it was needed, even when it was against our own interests.
Last, but not least (and a bit offtopic), I would like to emphasize that after the in-famous 50k sandwich that pushed everyone harder on fixing one of the multiple magic-trick we pulled out from the magic hat, we sent multiple messages on various channels where we were fully committed to refund this guy immediately for the entire amount as it was cristal clear that the victim was not a piece of monkey code but rather an user that made a huge mistake. Blockchain has always run with a simple rule: no pardon on mistakes. Ask the guy that rugpulled 2M from a scam maplestory (NXPC) if he can refund my 30k investment (https://bscscan.com/address/0xd15b0df3c1551dac1c929cd9faf04c82f2575002)
Hi Gio, as we talked, we believe you guys have already got the almost the same orderflow as we do,I believe you guys could check this from your side.
The reason why we are not open for public is what we said, we are the last person who take the responsiblility,personally I trust you and B6F, but I can’t leak anything without premission from our end users, that’s what we lived on.
So again, we believe it’s a fair searching competition among you guys and us, if you think latency is a thing, we are willing to offer any help.
We respect decentralization and believe that open competition is better. However, we are currently looking for a better solution, such as TEE or other mechanisms. We will consider it as soon as possible and then communicate with you.