The growth of layer-ii protocols has been one of the major stories of 2022 as the rise popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) take driven transaction costs college on the Ethereum (ETH) network, finer pricing out many participants.

Earlier this year the Polygon Network, formerly known every bit MATIC, emerged as 1 of the pinnacle contenders in the race for an effective Ethereum layer-two scaling solution, and the project'south QuickSwap DeFi platform was also one of the more successful Uniswap clones.

The platform was quite popular initially but as other platforms like Arbitrum and Optimism popped up, discussions near Polygon fell to the wayside and some traders even referred to the platform as "slow." Data from Flipside Crypto shows that the low-price capabilities of the Polygon network came under attack later on a cleverly devised arbitrage bot managed to turn 14 Ether in 218.five Ether in less than four months.

The bot filled each block with "meaningless transactions"

According to data from Flipside Crypto, the attack began in early May and at ane point in June, button transactions on the Polygon network went as high every bit 8 million per day. In the aforementioned timeframe, the maximum number of transactions on the Ethereum network was at 1.ii million.

Number of transactions on Ethereum vs. Polygon. Source: Flipside Crypto

Data constitute on a Polygon forum indicates that the attacker has been inflating transaction volumes past every bit much equally 90% by stuffing each cake full of "meaningless transactions" while but having to pay around 0.02 MATIC to spam the entire block and roughly $1,000 for an entire day.

A deeper swoop into the transactions and addresses interacting on the network revealed that effectually 30% of the network'due south transaction count was coming from two contracts, which take been determined to be arbitrage bots that comport thousands of daily transactions to diverse decentralized exchanges (DEX).

The exact reason why the spammer chose to fill each block when the bots were just conducting two,000 – 4,000 trades per day is uncertain, only i theory is that it was done in an endeavor to prevent anyone else from front running the trade.

Related: Polygon tin can hitting $3.50 in Q4 as MATIC's 20% weekly rally triggers bull flag setup

The bot netted $6,800 in average daily turn a profit

Over a period of 120 days, the bot was able to grow an initial amount of fourteen Ether to 218.5 Ether, which is currently worth $813,694.

That works out to an average daily of turn a profit roughly $half-dozen,800 before including the cost to spam the network.

In response to the spammer, the team backside Polygon ultimately decided to increase the minimum cost of a transaction from one gwei to 30 gwei as a way to fight spam and amend network health.

The movement appears to have achieved its intended goal as data provided past Delphi Digital shows that the fasten in boilerplate transaction costs coincided with a marked decline in the number of daily transactions because it now costs $30,000 to spam the network for an entire day.

Polygon boilerplate gas cost vs. daily transaction count. Source: Delphi Digital

Network data shows that the spam transactions have dropped from 2 million to 500,000 transactions per twenty-four hour period, a decrease of 75%, but they still business relationship for 16.seven% of daily transactions. This means that the bots are spending roughly $5,000 of their daily $6,800 turn a profit on gas to keep the scheme running.

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