This guide was authored by Captain Fortune and subsequently reviewed and contributed to by fellow crew members as co-authors. (To learn more about the Crew, please refer to link)
My MEV journey started with Solidity. A must learn if you're going to do MEV and it will be a prerequisite for learning assembly and understanding a lot of alpha that will be presented here during our adventure.
Part 0: Learn nodeJS. I assume you have this done, else very easy to learn. I'll let you do this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M576WGiDBdQ
- PART 1: 1:31:00 to 3:26:00
- PART 2: 11:49:05 to 13:29:15
- Conclusion (5 minutes): 16h:14:16
Once I learned Solidity, the next step was to learn ethersJS. This is necessary to connect your backend code to any blockchain and interact with it. There also exists web3JS but we will learn ethersJS because it is faster, better documented in both nodeJS and the Rust language
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk7nVp5HTCk&ab_channel=DappUniversity
With that we are ready to do start MEV-ing !
(Optional Great Complement) After a lot of research and wasting a lot of time trying to understand liquidations, arbitrage and flashloans as a beginner I came across EatTheBlocks Profitable Flashloans Course. You probably know him if you have tried learning MEV alone, his course is truly the best ressource you'll find and you will understand Liquidations, Flashloans, Arbitrage all while using Solidity and ETHERS which is what we just learned before! (this is not sponspored)
https://pro.eattheblocks.com/courses/enrolled/958603
The course if very cheap for what you learn but if you can't afford it, you can hop directly to Flashbot's simple arbitrage BOT explanatory video and watch it at least 2-3 times.
(NECESSARY) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn8r674U1B4&t=3387s&ab_channel=RobertMiller
- Better Simple Arb Bot This is a version of Flashbot's Simple Arbitrage BOT that has been improved
Close to the ending of the Flashbot's simple arbitrage they go over payloads, calldata and stuff which you'll inevitably find hard to understand. But don't worry. Here I am, the work and research is already done for you
PART 4: CALL FUNCTIONS WHITOUT NEED OF CONTRACT ABI (interfaces etc...) SAVE (A LOT OF) GAS LIKE THIS
READ ALL THIS. TON OF ALPHA. YOU'RE WELCOME.
By now, you might have found a strategy that you want to try. Here are almost all the gas optimizations you can use in a nutshell
- GAS OPTIMIZATIONS BY 0xMasashi
- MORE GAS OPTIMIZATIONS
- Advanced gas optimzations
- Huge Compilation of more gas Optimizations
EXTRA
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leave 1 wei of token in contract to avoid initializing storage twice for a same token (Basically when transfering token from you're contract send the amount minus 1 wei)
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When calling swap() V2 AMM's function (Pancake, Sushi, Uni, apeswap etc) for a multihop arbitrage, set the ‘to’ field to the address of the next Uniswap pair in your arbitrage hop. This avoids having to transfer the received tokens from your smart contract address to the next pair on every hop
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Pack your calldata. Normally, each argument in your calldata will be padded with leading 0s by the abiEncode function. This means you’ll often end up with extra 0s in your calldata that do nothing other than pad. Extra bytes mean extra gas. If you get your hands a bit dirty using inline assembly, you can bypass solidity’s standard abi decoder for calldata and just slice the calldata bytearray yourself: https://gist.github.com/0xmebius/f161abff38b88c9005db31d47e39bbe0
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Fixed size is better than dynamic size (array[5] instead of array[])
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Set the compiler optimizer (REMIX, truffle etc) to a high value. (1 round = less cost to deploy, costly fctns call. 100 000 rounds = expensive deploy, cheap calls). The less opcodes you have, the better. Computers are much better at optimizing than humans
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Another leading 0 hack. When you define a function foo(uint x), the function signature (the first 4 bytes of your transaction calldata used to select which function you are calling) will be the first 4 bytes of Keccak-256 hash of foo(uint x). You can brute force various function names so that Keccak256(FUNCTIONNAME(uint x))[:4] == 0x0000. This saves some gas since 0 byte calldata is slightly cheaper than non zero byte calldata https://github.com/fxfactorial/cheap-name-. However this will make it easier for people to see you in the mempool. Call it a psyop ?
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You can pretend to make a function call that is not what you're actually calling. For example you can pretend to approve a token by force bruting your function signature to have the same one as the approve function selector. This will appear on etherscan as if you're approving something when in reality you're not. Think about it.
GIT : https://github.com/botdad/power-clash
This code uses Rust which we have not learned yet, but the code can be easily used straight away whitout needing to understand rust. Hit me up on telegram if you need help with this.
If you want to go futher in the gas optimizations rabbit hole, you can learn assembly by first understanding how tf ethereum works (EVM and Stuff) and then learning actual assembly. I personally do not recommend trying to overoptimize your contract gas usage as it is time extensive and you should focus on finding new strategies instead. But you'll learn a ton by doing this and it is all very intersting.
- How tf Ethereum works don't want to read the yellowpaper? Read this
- *A Playdate with EVM Amazing intro of sorts to EVM
- *EVM DEEP DIVE 3 parts
- *VERY GOOD MEDIUM
- WATCH THIS AND TRY TO GO ALONG UNTIL YOU MASTER
PART 7: Advanced Arbitrage Convex Optimization and PATH finding => PART 8 might interest you first though
More advanced arbitrage uses convex optimization, DFS strategies. I also suggest you read about the BELLMAN-ford algo after you're done with these resources
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An Analysis of Uniswap Markets Section 2.1 explains the optimization problem for optimal arbitrage routing
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Complex DFS ARBITRAGE Code Implementation You'll have to generalize this for a larger number of hops
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CONVEX OPTIMIZATION by Noxx One of the best convex-optimization reads I have ever done that is actually arbitrage related and straight to the point. Effective communication is the best !
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Convex Optimization code implementation
Every catastrophe is an opportunity. Millions of money are stolen each month from contract vulnerabilites and security exploits. Almost every one sucks at solidity and have no idea how Smart Contract Security works and how easily their contract can exploited. By understanding smart contract vulnerabilities you will be able to upgrade your MEV-ing.
However, I found that no one teached this freely. But again, EatTheBlocks has an amazing course on this and you'll learn a lot (again, not sponspored)
PART 1 (smart contract vulnerabilities) : https://pro.eattheblocks.com/p/smart-contract-security-101
- Here You will learn about Access Control, Tx.Origin, Accessing Unencrypted Data, Overflow, Reentracy Attacks, Denial of Service, Proxy and Upgradeability, Weak Randomness, Replay Attacks How to exploit and how to solve
PART 2 (learn to find those vulnerabilities via dynamical methods and analysis): https://pro.eattheblocks.com/courses/enrolled/1462159
If again you can't afford this, consensys has a compilation of all known Attacks which you can learn about
https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/attacks/
Then, for pratice, you can complete these games where you basically have to exploit a contract that contains an exploit.
https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/level/0x5732B2F88cbd19B6f01E3a96e9f0D90B917281E5
Open-Sourced still semi-profitable frontrunning Bot that I wrote as a better alternative to libevm's bot. Contains the solution for optimal frontrunning amount in a single equation and much more.
- Frontrunning Bot by xCaptainFortune
Finally, a pratical example on how to perform multiple type of filters on millions of pairs. The goal of this repo is to be used as a low barrier of entry reference source for searchers (hence, JavaScript).
READ BERTCMILLER COMPILATION OF all his MEV related threads in chronologic order. Contains a lot of useful info.
https://twitter.com/bertcmiller/status/1402665992422047747
After you're done with this guide you're ready to go into the Dark Forest! What should you aim for ? Do not aim to make millions overnight. This is a misconception in MEV that has turned people into robots working their ass off 24/7 with unrealistic expectations. This is unhealthy & time is valuable, so use it well. You should aim to make enough money in passive income so you can pay your rent, food, debts and basically have no monetary problems. You can use the rest of your extra income to invest, enjoy life, build something for the long term ! I hope you enjoyed this guide & see ya in the mempool as they say ;)
I started MEV when almost no one knew about it. In that time, the forest was dark enough so that only a few bots lurked in it. The game was very profitable and vampire bots would make a few thousands a day & arbitrage bots even more. That was the golden era for us MEV searchers. After that it all went downside. Profits would start decreasing, us searchers had to optimize our bots, find new strategies and by the time flashbots had become popular, everyone knew about MEV. I stayed in the game for a while and realized it had become overcrowded and too hard for the new users who struggled to find the right ressources. Yet it was still incredibly profitable for the best searchers. I decided to create a NO BULLSHIT GUIDE TO MEV to help new searchers entering the game and give them something concrete to follow so that they could be part of the bests too in a reasonable timeframe.
After that, me, a few searchers & traders decided to create Twisted Fortune's Crew. The Crew's purpose was to provide Risk-free opportunities to our crew and lend a hand to people entering the wild cryptoverse. The two things that we find were the most Risk-free, time inexpensive and yet very profitable was the Sniping & Trading game. An excessive lot of people still use uniswap to make trades and buy new tokens and sniping bots take advantage of this. Futhermore, we found that statistically 95% of crypto-traders lost money trading by themselves. Twisted Fortune offers signals with a net average of 79% accuracy at an incredibly cheap rate compared to other signal providers that offer the same accuracy for 1000$-2000$ more. The money from the memberships is further used to buy insider-info, advice and knowledge so that we can offer the best crypto signals that our clients expect. If you'd like to join the Crew hit us up on telegram or snapchat! Else we wish you success and luck in the MEV-game, remember to take breaks & to enjoy 🤙
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