MEVoila is a malicious pattern extractor designed to crawl ethereum blocks and identify malicious patterns related to censorship and PGAs using only on-chain data.
To identify a pattern, MEVoila replays failed transactions at previous indexes and blocks and checks to see if the status changes. If there is a close proximity that allows a failed transaction to be successful, we call that transaction a rational failed transaction. The failed transactions that can not be run in any of those positions that the transaction is replayed in, are called irrational failed transactions.
We consider rational failed transactions were aiming to be included in a certain position to capture an opportunity. However, they were unfortunate enough to be included by block builders in a position that the opportunity was already captured. This happens regularly since opportunity capturing is a competitive task, especially on popular network like Ethereum. Many opportunity capturing transactions rather fail in case of the opportunity not being available anymore, since they tend to use a huge amount of gas, these transactions are called checked MEV. We categorize the reason of rational transactions failing in several categories:
- It was a part of a PGA and lost.
- It was front-ran by another transaction.
- It was censored by block builders and included after the opportunity was captured.
- It was actually sent late to the network by the sender.