From Flash Boys to Flashbots: The New Era of Front Running Is On‑Chain

This article is an opinion piece arguing that front running has moved on-chain to Ethereum and that encrypted mempools should be adopted as a protocol-level fix. It states that since 2020, more than $1.8 billion has been drained from Ethereum users through Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), much of it from front running and sandwich attacks. It describes MEV-Boost, Order-Flow Auctions and Private Routes as existing patches that leave transactions visible before inclusion in a block. It proposes encrypted mempools, which keep transaction contents hidden until ordering, as a chain-wide safeguard that would still permit benign MEV such as arbitrage and liquidations.