More to Extract: Discovering MEV by Token Contract Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel pipeline for discovering token contract MEV opportunities, revealing significant unexploited profits and demonstrating the effectiveness of static analysis and search techniques.

Contribution

It presents a new approach combining static analysis and token-specific search methods to identify and exploit tMEV opportunities overlooked by existing tools.

Findings

tSEARCH uncovers 10 times more profit than current MEV activity

The pipeline effectively identifies non-standard token functions

Prototype implementation shows high efficiency with low overhead

Abstract

This paper tackles the discovery of tMEV, that is, the Maximal Extractable Value on blockchains that arises from Token smart contracts. This scope differs from the existing MEV-discovery research, which analyzes application-layer contracts or attacker contracts, but ignores the wide and diverse range of token contracts. This paper presents a pipeline of techniques for tMEV discovery, including tSCAN, a static analysis tool for identifying non-standard supply-control functions in token contracts, and tSEARCH, a searcher that uncovers profitable tMEV opportunities by generating, refining, and solving token-specific constraints. By replaying real-world transactions, this paper demonstrates both the profitability of tMEV strategies and existing searchers' unawareness of them: the proposed tSEARCH extracts $10\times$ more profit than observed MEV activity on Ethereum. The practicality of tMEV searching is demonstrated through a prototype built on Slither, showing high effectiveness with low performance overhead.