If you are interested in science fiction, you must have heard of The Three-Body Problem and the sophons in it - microscopic particles controlled by the Trisolaran people. They expand protons into two dimensions and etch circuits on them to make supercomputers and become three-dimensional computers. The bodys ambassador to the earth, monitoring the earths people and locking down the earths basic science.

Now, the Sophon Robot has arrived in the BRC-20 ecosystem.

As shown in the figure below, there are many inscriptions with a supply quantity of 1 or single digits appearing in the mempool of BRC-20. The reason is that someone deployed a preemptive robot. Whenever a new inscription is found to be deployed in the mempool, the robot The same name (tink) will be deployed, the supply is set to 1, and the first one to complete the deployment by paying high gas will prevent others from deploying tokens with the same name.

Creating a small square with a quantity of 1 is a masterpiece of sniping the newly created tink. Source:GeniiData

What is the sophon robot BRC-20?

This BRC-20 token sniper robot was developed by Bitcoin developer Rijndael (@rot 13 maxi) was released on October 3statementDeployment, its name Sophon is inspired by the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem.

Before introducing the attack principle of Sophon, we need to first understand the operating rules of the BRC-20 token. Whether it is deployment (Deploy), mint (Mint) or transfer (Transfer), the rules are first come, first served. For deployment (Deploy), if there are BRC-20 tokens with the same name deployed, the one deployed first is regarded as the only successful deployment.

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Sophon uses the rules of first come, first served and transaction disclosure. The robot monitors the mempool. Whenever a new BRC-20 token is discovered to be deployed, the robot will pay a high gas fee to deploy the token of the same name first. And set the supply to 1, so that others cannot obtain the newly deployed tokens, and the supply of tokens deployed by the robot is only 1, which cannot obtain market circulation.

But Rijndael on October 27AnnounceStop operating Sophon because it costs too much gas. After Sophon was shut down, Rijndael donated the Bitcoins in UTXO to opensats.

Although Sophon only ran for more than 20 days, it briefly caused a depression in the deployment of BRC-20 tokens.

Dune dashboard data shows that after Sophon was activated on October 3, text-based inscriptions plummeted from 49,000 the previous day to 13,700, a 72% drop. On October 23, the day after Sophon ran out of funds, the number rose from 11,500 to 74,300, a 540% increase.

The gap is the Sophon deployment stage picture source:Dune

Ordinals Hub maintainer cbspears (@cbspears)alsoCommentTo Since Sophon was deployed, the number of UTXOs has decreased by more than 10 million, and the moment he shut down Sophon, the number of UTXOs began to increase. Rijndael is actually saving Bitcoin.

But recently, as Rijndael open sourced the Sophon code, similar sniper robots have begun to act in the mempool of BRC-20. I think its great that theres a copy of Sophon running and its not me, Rijndael said in an interview.

mempool is a stress test for PVP, BRC-20

The existence of Sophon has mixed reviews in the community. Some people think it is a benefit to the already deployed BRC-20 tokens, while others say it is the revenge of Bitcoin OG to protect Bitcoin from BRC 20 dust attacks. Because even the chief maintainer of the Ordinals protocol, rap (@raphjaph) also called on us to need Sophon in the comment section of a tweet making fun of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

On the left is a mining machine, on the right is Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel Three-Body: Dark Forest

But in the view of Sophon deployer Rijndael, he needs to prove to those who support BRC-20 that using Bitcoin as a global namespace based on block inclusion ordering is a vulnerable mechanism.

Rijndael calls BRC-20s mempool PVP, which means players versus players. Since the game rules of BRC-20 are first come, first served, just like a real-person MMO game, you need to always be wary of other players launching attacks on you. attack. Rijndael in an interviewexpressYou have to assume that there are monsters lurking in the mempool, and if your deployment is vulnerable, the monsters will come and eat your tokens.

We can convert Bitcoin in UTXO from RijndaelDonateTo prove to opensats that he is not deploying Sophon for profit, it may be understood as a kind of stress test for the BRC-20.

However, it is unknown whether Rijndael deployed Sophon to improve the rules of BRC-20, because the answer he gave when replying to why he did this was-for civilization.

MEV on Bitcoin?

No one tells me that there is no MEV on Bitcoin anymore. The existence of Sophon also caused the community to discuss Bitcoin MEV and Private Mempool.

The term MEV originated from Ethereum and was originally the abbreviation of Miner Extractable Value. After Ethereum switched from PoW to PoS, it was renamed Maximal Extractable Value.

Under the POW mechanism, when a user submits a transaction on the blockchain, the transaction information will not be immediately recorded in the block, but will be temporarily placed in a public pending transaction pool, which everyone can see. to its contents. Arbitrage and miners can monitor this transaction pool and use this to maximize profits. For example, in the process of packaging blocks, miners can use their power to sort submitted transactions and rank their own transactions in front of real users. , to increase the transaction costs of real users.

The private memory pool (Private Mempool) usually refers to the memory pool of a specific node that is independent of the public network memory pool. A public network mempool is a collection containing pending transactions waiting for miners to package and add them to a block, while a private mempool is a mempool maintained solely by a specific miner or network node.

BRC-20s mempool operating rules - open transactions, first come first served - will bring MEV if exploited. Imagine what will happen when more than one Sophon-like front-running robot appears in the mempool of BRC-20?