BRC20 Sniping Attack Disrupts Token Market Integrity
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🪙✨ BRC20 Sniping Attack Disrupts Fairness in Token Markets. A new paper introduces the BRC20 sniping attack, which undermines the integrity of open BRC20 token markets by manipulating token transfers and disrupting the traditional “highest bidder wins” principle. The attack exploits the mempool’s fee-based transaction selection mechanism, allowing attackers to inject front-running transactions that complete the signature of Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT). This method effectively replaces legitimate transactions with higher-fee submissions, impacting various platforms that utilize PSBT for BRC20 transfers, including major Bitcoin exchanges like Magic Eden and OKX. The researchers validated the attack’s effectiveness through experiments on a Bitcoin testnet and have responsibly disclosed their findings to the affected exchanges.
