$60 million drained from Ethereum users by frontrunning bots in a year. Now someone is hiding transactions in a black box 🦖
🚨 行情变了群里说
On Monday, the established blockchain Aptos launched a new feature on its mainnet called an encrypted mempool. In simple terms, it keeps your transactions encrypted after you submit them and until they’ve been ordered and finalized in a block. No one can see what’s inside ahead of time ⚠️
When you submit a large transaction on-chain, everyone on the network can see in advance which contract you’re calling, what you’re trading, and how much. Frontrunning bots exploit that transparency to get ahead of you—or sandwich your transaction—and make money at your expense. According to figures from EigenPhi cited by Cointelegraph, Ethereum users lost about $60 million to these sandwich attacks in a year. In a sample of Solana activity tracked by Bitquery, bots made $29.7 million using the same tactic over 11 months, through roughly 6.9 million attacks that affected around 2.2 million wallets 💥
How does it work? If your wallet or app supports the feature, your transaction is encrypted on your phone before it’s sent to the blockchain. Validators can see your address and transaction fee, but not the transaction contents. First, everyone agrees on the ordering. Once it’s set, the validators collectively decrypt and execute the transactions. The key point is that no individual validator can decrypt them alone, so they can’t peek in advance ✅
There are trade-offs, too: the minimum fee for an encrypted transaction is twice the network’s base minimum. In tests with 50 nodes, each block took about 20 milliseconds longer. Aptos says its approach is different because ordering and decryption are handled collectively by the existing validators, without relying on a separate decryption committee or a trusted block builder.
This isn’t the first move of its kind in the industry. In July 2024, Gnosis Chain launched an encrypted mempool in partnership with Shutter. On Ethereum, there’s also Flashbots Protect, which sends transactions privately to block builders. Whoever can keep transactions hidden until they’re on-chain can help users get picked off by bots less often. Aptos has made it an optional feature on its mainnet, and also added support for institutional large-value transactions and AI agents.
My take: encrypted mempools tackle information asymmetry, not price volatility. They don’t guarantee you’ll make money; they just stop frontrunning bots from making money by peeking at your orders. Adoption will be the real test. If people are willing to pay twice the base gas fee for this protection, it shows just how badly on-chain traders have been hurt by MEV. On the other hand, if no one uses it, it’ll just be another optional feature gathering dust in the corner.
What’s worth watching is whether other major blockchains follow suit—and whether tools like this can genuinely reduce the scale of on-chain MEV.
Do you think hiding transactions is a shield for retail traders, or will it make on-chain activity less transparent? Join the conversation in the comments 👀🚀
Tap the profile picture to watch the livestream
Every day, we bring you the latest in crypto security—not just what’s happening, but the logic and opportunities behind the news 👀🚀
🚨 行情变了群里说
On Monday, the established blockchain Aptos launched a new feature on its mainnet called an encrypted mempool. In simple terms, it keeps your transactions encrypted after you submit them and until they’ve been ordered and finalized in a block. No one can see what’s inside ahead of time ⚠️
When you submit a large transaction on-chain, everyone on the network can see in advance which contract you’re calling, what you’re trading, and how much. Frontrunning bots exploit that transparency to get ahead of you—or sandwich your transaction—and make money at your expense. According to figures from EigenPhi cited by Cointelegraph, Ethereum users lost about $60 million to these sandwich attacks in a year. In a sample of Solana activity tracked by Bitquery, bots made $29.7 million using the same tactic over 11 months, through roughly 6.9 million attacks that affected around 2.2 million wallets 💥
How does it work? If your wallet or app supports the feature, your transaction is encrypted on your phone before it’s sent to the blockchain. Validators can see your address and transaction fee, but not the transaction contents. First, everyone agrees on the ordering. Once it’s set, the validators collectively decrypt and execute the transactions. The key point is that no individual validator can decrypt them alone, so they can’t peek in advance ✅
There are trade-offs, too: the minimum fee for an encrypted transaction is twice the network’s base minimum. In tests with 50 nodes, each block took about 20 milliseconds longer. Aptos says its approach is different because ordering and decryption are handled collectively by the existing validators, without relying on a separate decryption committee or a trusted block builder.
This isn’t the first move of its kind in the industry. In July 2024, Gnosis Chain launched an encrypted mempool in partnership with Shutter. On Ethereum, there’s also Flashbots Protect, which sends transactions privately to block builders. Whoever can keep transactions hidden until they’re on-chain can help users get picked off by bots less often. Aptos has made it an optional feature on its mainnet, and also added support for institutional large-value transactions and AI agents.
My take: encrypted mempools tackle information asymmetry, not price volatility. They don’t guarantee you’ll make money; they just stop frontrunning bots from making money by peeking at your orders. Adoption will be the real test. If people are willing to pay twice the base gas fee for this protection, it shows just how badly on-chain traders have been hurt by MEV. On the other hand, if no one uses it, it’ll just be another optional feature gathering dust in the corner.
What’s worth watching is whether other major blockchains follow suit—and whether tools like this can genuinely reduce the scale of on-chain MEV.
Do you think hiding transactions is a shield for retail traders, or will it make on-chain activity less transparent? Join the conversation in the comments 👀🚀
Tap the profile picture to watch the livestream
Every day, we bring you the latest in crypto security—not just what’s happening, but the logic and opportunities behind the news 👀🚀