Transparent Dishonesty: Blockchain Front-running Taxonomy
Duration: 00:05:07
Speaker: Shayan Eskandari
Type: Breakout
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jun 2026
Front-running has been an issue in financial instrument markets since the 1970s. With the advent of the blockchain technology, front-running has resurfaced in new forms we explore here, instigated by blockchains decentralized and transparent nature. In this paper, we draw from a scattered body of knowledge and instances of front-running across the top 25 most active decentral applications (DApps) deployed on Ethereum blockchain, and an instance of abnormal behaviour of a mining pool to participate in an ICO. We also introduce a taxonomy of front-running attacks on blockchain and map the proposed solutions to front-running into useful categories. Published at Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2019: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05164