Report: Bot-spam attack on the Polygon network yielded about $6,900 a day

Two arbitrage bots on the Polygon network turned 14 ETH of initial investment into 218.5 ETH (~$830,300) in under four months, according to исследования Flipside Crypto.

Average earnings ran about $6,900 per day, not counting the cost of spam transactions.

According to the researchers, the attack began in early May. In June, the daily transaction count (TPD) for Polygon peaked at 8 million. The Ethereum metric at that time stood at 1.2 million TPD.

The attacker filled each block with “meaningless transactions”; spam cost him roughly $1,000 per day. Network load reached up to 90%.

Flipside Crypto analysts found that about 30% of the TPD came from two contracts. Analysts identified them as arbitrage bots that conducted 2,000–4,000 trades daily on various DEXs.

The objective of arbitrage is to profit from price differences across platforms.

The contracts themselves drew roughly 2 million incoming transactions per day. Researchers suggested that this arrangement prevented others from front-running bots in real trades.

8 октября 2021 года команда Polygon увеличила минимальную цену на газ с 1 Gwei до 30 Gwei для борьбы со спам-транзакциями.

После корректировки их количество действительно упало на 75% — с 2 млн до 500 000 TPD.

The total number of transactions also fell by 50%, and network load dropped to 60%.

Flipside Crypto noted that even after the decline in spam transactions, their daily share remains 16.7%. This means the bot operator spends about $5,000 for the scheme to continue.

In early October, the number of active addresses on Polygon first exceeded the analogous Ethereum metric.

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