What is frontrunning?

Описание: Ethereum and other DeFi-supporting platforms with mining and gas fees suffer from a problem called "frontrunning".

The problem takes its name from a similar activity that is sometimes illegally undertaken by stock brokerages and hedge funds, whereby these middlemen use their insider knowledge of upcoming trades that will affect the markets to place their own trades in order to profit.

In DeFi the practice involves monitoring submitted transactions to see if they will make a profit, copying them, and then ensuring that the copied transaction is acted on first. It's the DeFi trading equivalent of stealing someone else's idea.