Death Star: Hack and Scam Prevention with a MEV Frontrunner

The Problem: Recent exploits on Wormhole, Poly, Compound and OpenSea have shown us two things: 1) even the most successful projects are at risk of exploits & hacks, and 2) there's nothing in place to protect users that use these platforms from losing their crypto. Additionally, scams and phishing exploits have become increasingly more sophisticated, employing social engineering to convince users to sign fraudulent smart contracts that drain their wallets. Web3 needs a way for users to protect their assets from malicious actors.

The solution: Users whitelist addresses in their approved "address book." When a token transaction to a non-whitelisted address occurs (e.g. you transfer tokens to an unauthorized address), our MEV frontrunner immediately sends a transaction that transfers all of a users' assets to a fallback address, with 2 times the gas of the detected transaction. This makes sure that the miner chooses our transaction before the malicious one. At this point, the hacker's transaction is outbid and a user can now recover their funds from the fallback address.

How it works: We take advantage of MEV to detect malicious transactions and fail them by outbidding them with an emergency transfer. MEV, or Miner Extractable Value, is a term coined in 2019 to describe the exploit where a miner rearranges transactions in their block to maximize profit. The assumption is that miners are always looking to maximize profits; thus, by sending a transaction with significantly higher gas that safely transfers a wallet's funds to a vault or fallback address, users can protect themselves from hacks and scams. The MEV frontrunner can transfer out your tokens because it has been Approved for each (Approval is an ERC-20 function).