According to Flipside Crypto, the Polygon Network was subjected to a spam assault after a well-built arbitrage bot converted 14 ETH to 218.5 ETH in less than four months. With the spam costs deducted, the average profit per day was $6,800. Attacks on the Polygon Network started in early May, and by June, daily transaction volume had risen to 8 million. The Ethereum network’s highest transaction volume was 1.2 million over the same period.
According to data from the Polygon forum, to make matters worse, despite spamming every block with “meaningless transactions,” the attacker only paid 0.02 MATIC for the privilege and spent around $1,000 for the whole day. Flipside Crypto experts conducted a study and found two contracts, which were recognized as arbitrage bots that carry out thousands of daily trades on different decentralized exchanges (DEX carried that approximately 30% of the network’s transactions out).
To prevent spam and enhance network health, the Polygon team decided to raise the transaction minimum fee from 1 gwei to 30 gwei. This choice was successful in achieving what it set out to do. According to data from Delphi Digital, the rise in average transaction prices has occurred at the same time as a sharp decline in the number of transactions conducted each day. Now it costs $30,000 to spam the network for a day.
Spam transactions have decreased from 2 million per day to 500,000 per day, a 75 % reduction. Still, they account for 16.7% of daily transactions, according to network statistics. For the bots, this equates to an additional $5,000 a day in gas expenses in keeping the scheme going.
