What Is Frontrunning?

Frontrunning is a MEV strategy where an automated bot monitors the public mempool for pending transactions and places its own transaction ahead by paying higher gas fees to gain execution priority. In decentralised finance, frontrunners exploit advance knowledge of upcoming trades to profit from the price movements those trades will cause. While frontrunning is illegal in traditional finance, its status in decentralised markets remains a subject of debate. Solutions to mitigate frontrunning include private mempools, commit-and-reveal schemes and protocols like MEV Blocker.

See also

• MEV

• Sandwich attack

• Slippage

• Gas fee

• Decentralised exchange