MEV Bots Rake In $2 Million After Sniping Keys on Friend.tech

An estimated 125 MEV bots sniped 21,000 profiles from the platform over the last two weeks.

Friend.tech, the newly launched decentralized social media application built on Coinbase’s Layer 2 Base, has quickly become a viral sensation within the crypto community. However, its rapid growth has also piqued the interest of those deploying Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bots, that have earned millions by sniping “keys” from the platform.

According to data compiled by 21.co analyst Tom Wan, around 125 MEV bots sniped 21,000 profiles, or keys, which are friend.tech’s main asset. These keys are essentially tokenized X profiles that can be bought or sold through the platform, going up or down in value determined by the smart contract’s demand-based pricing curve.

Stats about MEV on @friendtech

1. Estimated ~125 MEV Bots

2. Over 21k Profiles got sniped, mostly profiles created after 16 Aug

3. Estimated Amount of Profit by MEV Bots are $2M+

4. MEV Bots constitute 91% of the failed transactions that interact with FT contract address

5.… pic.twitter.com/9Jps3BXuUI

— Tom Wan (@tomwanhh) August 24, 2023

Wan found that the MEV bots made over $2 million from these sniped profiles, and made up 91% of the failed transactions on the friends.tech contract address.

He also discovered that the MEV bots were able to include their buy transaction in the same block when the subject bought their own share, and hence, were able to get the best entry price for transactions.

One X user, “@evmcheb,” published an open source script for users to snipe transactions from the friend.tech platform.

for the 7 mev searchers still here – here's an open sourced rust https://t.co/r4xEsdGTXa mempool sniper.

main trading/mev lesson learnt from this week:

if you think you're late to a highly profitable trading strategy, you probably are. but it doesn't mean trying is not worth…

— cheb (online) 🐲 (@evmcheb) August 24, 2023

“elaborating on the mempool leak: op-stack chains should be a blind mempool. i.e. only the trusted sequencer can see all the txns. however by default the base op-stack node had txpool rpc enabled,” tweeted evmcheb.

Earlier this week, friend.tech denied a report that its database linking users’ Ethereum wallets to their X accounts had been leaked. The team behind the project said the so-called leaked database was merely someone publicly scraping their application programming interface (API) and was not equivalent to a hack.