Anyone else heard of the Sophon bot that snipes brc-20 in the mempool and front-run them?
Front-run them? By paying higher on-chain fees? That would absolutely make the fees higher and the network more congested, no? He's not making the situation better for the users in general in my opinion.
Is it currently running? Because it could also be the reason why we're having record-breaking fees. Perhaps it was better to let users use the blockchain?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
From what I heard and read in the article, it doesn't just front-run the brc-20 in the mempool, it changes also the mint amount to 1 which spoil the whole transaction. (Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong)
From the article: "The Sophon was activated on October 3, and text-based inscriptions plummeted 72% to 13,700 from 49,000 the day before..."
Yes, the bot pays higher fees at the moment brc-20 get detected, but creates disruption for inscriptions hence overall fees lessen.
it says in the article that the bot lacked funds to operate around october 23rd which is when the inscriptions fees rose exponentially again.
So in theory it is not running right now. Not saying this bot is a gamechanger but it could be a fun little tool to spoil the token minting / inscriptions on Bitcoin...
It would be nice to see it be fired up as it would be a huge fee saver if it works. I suspect it does not work since the cost to run it was very small and why wouldn't someone cut a deal with its creator to run it.