What do studies say about sandwich attacks and front-running, and who wins?

"We find that the majority of flagged patterns are false positives and that the median net return for these attacks is negative."

"Our results suggest that sandwiching, while endemic and profitable on Ethereum L1, is rare, unprofitable, and largely absent in rollups with private mempools."

"We estimate that 19 major searchers extracted a total value of 233.8M USD from 7,203,560 CEX-DEX arbitrages during the observed period and uncover an increasing centralization trend, with the three leading searchers capturing approximately three-quarters of the total arbitrage volume and extracted value."

"Heimbach et al. [ 9 ] find that eleven searchers account for more than 80% of identified arbitrage volume, with the two largest searchers alone accounting for 49.2%."

"Long-tail sandwiching is not: 1,162 ex-post net-positive sandwiches over 2,550 blocks total 35.08 BNB (∼$20,200)—a ∼91× gap in count."

"Neutral searchers, distributing flow among multiple builders, retain higher profit margins. Conversely, exclusive searchers maintain lower margins, sharing most of their extracted value with affiliated builders, sometimes even operating at negative net profit."

"to front-run or back-run a victim [12] to build a bundle."

"Mamageishvili et al. [ 11 ] showed that validator revenue increases with searcher competition: when many searchers identify similar opportunities, competition pushes most of the value to the validator, while searchers retain more value when competition is weak."

"by an in-block counterfactual, is tiny: 45 of 96,064 (0.0468% by count, 0.0078% by value; 0 by builder)"

"The largest two searchers, Wintermute and SCP consistently extracted over 50% of total revenue throughout the entire observation period."

"For sandwich attacks, although the attacker typically searches only two trades, selecting the optimal pair incurs quadratic complexity."

"Empirical studies further confirmed that the searcher market is highly skewed toward large or specialized actors."

"The market thus resembles a clear trident, with three searchers— Wintermute , SCP , and Kayle —collectively capturing 170.8M USD, representing approximately 73% of the total cumulative extracted value."

"Prior work [15] shows that the capital optimization for Uniswap V2 DEXs [2] is a convex"

"Finally, Titan , despite not being vertically integrated with any searcher, earns the highest total profit. This is strong evidence that they have exclusive deals with high-value orderflow providers"

"As for the sandwich attacks, Lanturn identifies 4 new opportunities, yielding a total profit of 0.048 ETH with 0.051 ETH revenue and 0.003 ETH gas cost."

"While waiting in the mempool, these ‘in-flight’ transactions are publicly visible and vulnerable to front-running attacks, such that malicious parties use information in the transaction for their own gain and at a direct cost to the transaction owner."

"such that malicious parties use information in the transaction for their own gain and at a direct cost to the transaction owner."

"в роботі [6] вжито термін Miner Extractable Value"

"mitigate attacks using the MEV-geth protocol for in-flight transaction privacy."

"The technique is called a “sandwich attack” because the bot places one transaction before and one after the victim’s trade. The user gets squeezed in the middle, paying inflated prices while the bot extracts value from both sides of the trade."