Miners Allegedly Manipulating ETH Blocks To Exploit DeFi, Suggests Researcher

Some Ethereum miners seem to be re-engineering blocks to take advantage of DeFi prospects in a case of what is dubbed Miner Extractable Value (MEV).

Miner extractable value was long estimated by investigators as a likely exploit pattern for decentralized finance that leverages the miners’ exclusive protocol influence. Since miners have unrestricted control over what transactions to take in and in which order, this opens the means for more than a few manipulation techniques for on-chain DeFi.

Unidentified researcher Frank Topbottom emphasized numerous considerable instances of Miner Extractable Value in the wild, in what is expected to be the 1st time these activities have been observed by the crypto community.

It is to be noted that one of the transactions in question presents more than a few features that point to MEV. The first evidence is that its fee is just 2 Wei (which is effectively zero). Wei should not be confused with Gwei (which is equal to a billion Wei). The Wei is the minimum monetary unit of Ether, equal to a billionth of a billionth of Ethereum.

Notably, Ethereum miners can front-run every single non-miner because of their power to reorder transactions at will. Overall, the whole scenario of manipulating ETH blocks is quite concerning as more and more people are getting drawn to the crypto space because of remarkably high interest rates offered in the DeFi space.