The Blockchain Warfare: Investigating the Ecosystem of Sniper Bots on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain

Abstract

In the world of cryptocurrencies, the public listing of a new token often generates significant hype. In many cases, the price of the token skyrockets in a few seconds, and timing is crucial to determine the success or failure of an investment opportunity. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of sniper bots, automated tools designed to buy tokens as soon as they are listed on the market. We leverage GitHub open-source repositories of sniper bots to analyze their features and how they are implemented. Then, we build a dataset of Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain (BSC) liquidity pools to identify operations performed using sniper bots. Our findings reveal 352,413 sniping operations on Ethereum and 1,716,917 on BSC for a total turnaround of $155,630,184 and $137,548,859, respectively. We find that Ethereum operations have a higher success rate but require a larger investment. Finally, we analyze possible countermeasures and mechanisms used in token smart contracts that can reduce the negative impact of sniper bots.