High transaction fees and MEV star jaredfromsubway.eth
Plus Odds & Ends and Thoughts and Prognostications
ICYMI: Check out last month’s post, which dives into the restaking market and what the future of ETH yield products might look like.
Chart of the week: BTC & ETH fees soar
Ethereum fees have been higher than normal the last few weeks. According to ultra sound money, fees have averaged 59 gwei over the last 30 days and 108 gwei over the last week versus an average of 24.7 gwei since The Merge last September. The chart above from Coin Metrics’ latest “State of the Network” also highlights the recent increase in Bitcoin fees, caused by the success of ordinals and the BRC-20 standard (imitation is the highest form of flattery).
On Ethereum, high gas fees are from the surging $PEPE memecoin (like Doge or Shibu but Pepe instead). This has led to the highest gas expenditure (in ETH terms) from Uniswap since May 2021:
Tweet of the week: Star MEV bot’s secrets
The biggest gas guzzler of the last few weeks is the mysterious jaredfromsubway.eth MEV bot, whose name is a reference to its heavy use of sandwich attacks to unsuspecting users. Flashbots Bert Miller’s tweet above is one in a longer thread looking at jaredfromsubway.eth’s on-chain activity. It has been particularly active in the PEPE trading frenzy.
EigenPhi estimated that jaredfromsubway.eth has raked in over $7m in profit since April 17. EigenPhi’s newsletter had two posts this week focused on jaredfromsubway.eth, one on data from its trades (including a chart that shows 60% of Ethereum blocks since April 17 have had a transaction from jaredfromsubway.eth) and the other detailing the flow of transaction ordering.
Odds & Ends
Rick protocol Cozy launches v2 on Optimism Link
Spark Protocol launches on Maker Protocol, offering enhanced features Link
Blend launches Blur, an oracle-free NFT lending platform Link
Synthetix perps see $4bn in volume over seven weeks Link
Arbitrum DAO receives 3.4k ETH ($6m) from sequencer revenue Link
Curve to redeploy crvUSD stablecoin after 'mistake in deployment script' Link
Rune unveils 5 phases of Maker end game Link
GFX Labs makes another push to turn on Uniswap protocol fees Link
Thoughts & Prognostications
The definitive guide to [rollup] sequencing [James Prestwich]
The future of MEV: Smoothing vs. burning vs. sharing [Joules Barragan/Blocknative]
Solana’s lack of liquid staking hinders its DeFi ecosystem development [Anders/MarginFi]
ETH flows after the Shapella upgrade [Kunal Goel/Messari]
CoW Protocol sees an order of magnitude less of sandwich trades compared to other DEXs [EigenPhi]
The way protocol revenue & token mints are spent in Cosmos is broken [Noam Cohen/Binary Builders]
Time, slots, and the ordering of events in Ethereum Proof-of-Stake [Georgios Konstantopoulos & Mike Neuder/Paradigm]
That’s it! Feedback appreciated. Just hit reply. Written in a rainy Nashville. Grateful for my mother and my baby’s mama.
Dose of DeFi is written by Chris Powers, with help from Denis Suslov and Financial Content Lab. All content is for informational purposes and is not intended as investment advice.