Brief Description
Secret Network only has one mempool, and it’s an encrypted mempool. Until recently (Q1 2023), it was possible to simulate transactions before they were finalized. Now, transactions in the encrypted mempool must be finalized without decrypting them at all, and only after the ordering is finalized are they executed.
We would expect that in the past, front-running may have been possible. However, it’s unclear if there’s any way we could retroactively analyze the blockchain to see if this was the case.
Even now, we might suspect there are front runners.
Is there a race to arbitrage right when the block ends? What data could we collect that is relevant? On one hand this is just a cosmos chain. On the other hand, the complexity of executing transactions means that inferring things from it may be difficult.
More details and discussion
This line of reasoning (does arbitrage fight exist in Secret Network?) was roughly described in the talk: SUAVE smart contract programming model: TEE-based smart contracts for block building. So this project is basically about determining if this conjectured MEV is occurring or not.
