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An arbitrage bot recently attacked the Polygon network and managed to turn 14 ETH into 218.5 ETH just by spamming the Polygon network for 120 days. Earlier this year, Polygon, also known as Matic, emerged as one of the top contenders in the race for an effective Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.
Arbitrage Bot Attacks Polygon Network, Generated $6,800 Per Day
One of the major stories in focus in the year 2021 has been the growth of layer-two protocols as the surging popularity of decentralized finance (Defi) and Non-Fungible Tokens have driven transaction costs higher on the Ethereum network.
Though the Matic platform was popular at the beginning, some traders referred to it as a slow platform, and discussions about Polygon reduced with the emergence of platforms such as Arbitrum and Optimism.
Talking more about the attack, in accordance with the data revealed from Flipside Crypto, the attack started in the month of May and at some point in the month of June, pushed transactions on the Polygon network to be at 1.2 million.
As per the data revelations on a Polygon forum, the attacker has been inflating transaction volumes by over 90% by stuffing each block full of meaningless transactions while only having to pay around 0.02 MATIC to spam the entire block and around $1,000 a day.
MATIC Team’s Action Against Spammer
In response to the spammer, the team behind MATIC ultimately took the decision to increase the minimum cost of a transaction from 1 gwei to 30 gwei as a way to counter spam and improve the overall health of the network.
According to the data provided by Delphi Digital, the spike in the average transaction costs coincided with a marked decline in the number of daily transactions because it now costs $30,000 to spam the network for an entire day.