Polygon bot spam attack earns $ 6,800 per day. The development of Layer 2 protocols is one of the big stories of 2021. Especially at a time when DeFi and NFT are becoming increasingly popular and causing higher transaction costs on the Ethereum network. Earlier this year, the Polygon Network, formerly known as MATIC, emerged as one of the leading competitors in the race for an efficient Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution. In particular, the project’s QuickSwap DeFi platform is also one of the successful Uniswap clones.

Bot turns 14 ETH into 218.5 ETH by spamming Polygon for 120 days

The platform was quite popular at first, but when new names like Arbitrum and Optimism emerged, discussions about Polygon ended in a dead end and some traders even referred to the platform as the “Bull Turtle”. Data from Flipside Crypto shows that it is very likely that the low cost of the Polygon network was impacted after an arbitrage bot turned 14 ETH into 218.5 ETH in less than four months.

According to data from Flipside Crypto, the attack began in early May, and sometime in June the bot was driving transactions on the Polygon network up to 8 million a day. During the same period, the maximum number of transactions on the Ethereum network is 1.2 million.

Transactions on Ethereum vs. Polygon | Source: Flipside Crypto

Data from a Polygon forum shows that the attacker inflated the transaction volume by up to 90% by filling each block with junk transactions while paying only about 0.02 MATIC for them.

A deeper look at the exchanges and addresses of interactions on the network reveals that about 30% of the network’s trades come from two contracts identified as arbitrage bots. They performed thousands of transactions for various DEXs every day.

The exact reason why spammers fill every block when bots are only doing 2,000-4,000 transactions per day cannot be precisely assessed. But one theory is that they were tried to prevent others from leaving the trade.

Bot earns $ 6,800 in average daily profit

Over a period of 120 days, the bot was able to increase the initial amount from 14 ETH to 218.5 ETH, now valued at $ 813,694. That generates an average daily profit of around $ 6,800 before the cost of spamming the network is factored in.

Finally, to fight spammers, the team behind Polygon decided to increase the minimum cost of a transaction from 1 gwei to 30 gwei to combat spam and improve network health, such as: Bitcoin magazine reported.

This idea seems to be working because, according to data from Delphi Digital, the average transaction fee has skyrocketed, along with a noticeable drop in the number of daily transactions, as it currently costs bots up to $ 30,000, all day network- Operate spam.

Average Gas Cost on Polygon vs. Daily Transactions | The source: Delphi Digital

Network data shows that spam transactions have dropped from 2 million to 500,000 transactions per day, a 75% decrease, but they still account for 16.7% of daily transactions. This means that bots are spending about $ 5,000 of their daily profit of $ 6,800 on gas fees to keep their plan going.

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According to Cointelegraph

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