A Cornell University paper has discovered that decentralized exchanges (DEX) are beset by bot trading, dubbed Flash Boys. The markets, freely available to anyone, are still seeing fake activity or concerted bot orders, in effect skewing the market and achieving pumps.
“Like high-frequency traders on Wall Street, these bots exploit inefficiencies in DEXes, paying high transaction fees and optimizing network latency to frontrun, i.e., anticipate and exploit, ordinary users’ DEX trades,” the researchers discovered.
The research comes on the tails of previous insights into what looks like bloated, faked, or bot-generated orders on centralized exchanges. Activity on those exchanges outpaced the actual accounts, suggesting some of the orders are not...
