Crypto Brothers Front-Ran the Front-Runners
MEV spoofing, nonfungible Bitcoins and more BLS leaks.
Sometimes there are profitable trades, but not that often. Sometimes someone is looking to sell 100 widgets at $20 on the American Widget Exchange, and someone else is looking to buy 100 widgets for $21 on the National Widget Exchange. And so you can buy on the AWE and sell on the NWE and make an instant $100 profit. But only one person can do that. Once you buy on the AWE and sell on the NWE, the window is closed.
Who gets to do the trade? The most intuitive answer, in most cases, is “whoever does it first.” If you see the same thing trading for two different prices on two different exchanges, and I don’t, and you send in the orders to the exchanges before me, then you do the trade and I don’t. For most human-scale trades, this makes sense and is easy to administer and feels basically fair.