Odysseas Lamtzidis

Frontrunning hacks is an up-and-coming application of MEV in security and, more specifically, hack prevention. In an industry that is hunted by billions of dollars in hacked funds, users need a system that they can safely use to manage their wealth, so more and more creative ideas are being suggested as a solution. Frontrunning hacks started organically, as MEV searchers generally front-run anything valuable via generalized frontrunning bots. With millions of funds secured and returned via these generalized frontrunning bots, services that offer specifically this benefit to protocols have started to appear. All of these are bound to become irrelevant, as the moment they become ubiquitous, hackers will choose to use private builders that will directly produce blocks that include malicious transactions. Even if block builders start cooperating with said services, we will see the creation of "back mem pools," builders that cater to hackers' needs and will include malicious transactions, no questions asked. These builders will be protocol-compliant, and the community can do nothing about it. In this talk, we will go through the current landscape, explore why these solutions become notorious (and how they work), and then describe the end-state and these black mem pools.

I am building Phylax, a new startup in hack prevention. Phylax will initially launch a free and open-source (AGPLv3) agent that enables developers to easily monitor their dapps by defining alerts in solidity! Instead of having to learn bespoke SDKs or use SaaS-based, closed-source systems, users can deploy Phylax and run assertions (alerts) about their dapps using the language and framework they already know: Solidity and Foundry. The tools that exists are either hard to use and expressive (developers can express any kind of alert over onchain state) or easy to use and very restricting. Phylax does both by leveraging the mental models the devs already have and the toolchains that everyone uses. That means that they can be productive in literal minutes, over hours or weeks that is usually required to setup a monitoring solution. At the same time, they can define onchain or offchain actions in case the alerts go off. Phylax Node will always be a free and open source piece of software, aiming to enable developers to offer a higher degree of security to their users. Phylax is currently in private alpha and will release soon.