Stephane Gosselin, who previously co-founded MEV-focused research firm Flashbots, has unveiled Alfred – a new bot on Telegram designed to facilitate user-friendly execution of token swaps and protect against maximum extractable value (MEV) profits generated by reorders are of transactions.
After leaving Flashbots last year, Gosselin is now CEO of Frontier Research and has ventured into Telegram bots, a niche that’s seeing a lot of interest but also faces challenges around product maturity and user security.
He co-developed Alfred in collaboration with another research firm, Kolibrio, to address the maximum recoverable value problem in on-chain swaps caused by front-running and realignment of liquidity pools on Ethereum. Overall, the bot aims to provide users with advanced trading tools in addition to protection against MEV within the social messaging app’s interface.
“I’m excited to introduce Alfred and work on improving the user experience in web3. “Alfred leverages all the exciting innovations that the transactional supply chain brings to create delightful on-chain interactions,” Gosselin said in a statement to The Block.
In 2020, Gosselin, along with other co-founders, began working on Flashbots, a research and development company focused on MEV. There he was involved in designing the MEV supply chain.
He left Flashbots in October 2022 due to disagreements surrounding the company’s MEV Boost software’s reported censorship of transactions. The software reportedly filtered out Ethereum transactions related to OFAC-sanctioned Tornado Cash.
In July 2023, the Paradigm-backed company raised $60 million at a valuation of $1 billion.
Competitive Telegram bot niche
The Alfred bot enters a competitive arena with several existing projects, including Unibot, Banana Gun and Maestro, and began operations last week. As a Telegram bot, it targets Ethereum users with features designed for token sniping and swapping, while protecting transactions from the intrusion of malicious bots, a widespread problem in decentralized finance.
Using Alfred is straightforward: users command the Alfred bot in a Telegram chat, which displays a menu for creating a new wallet. Alfred then generates a private key and the corresponding address directly in the chat. Users can then start exchanging tokens.
The Alfred bot, released by Flashbots’ former co-founder, marks a departure from the practice of anonymity common with Telegram bots. This comes in a context where the trustworthiness and security of Telegram bots created by unknown developers have been repeatedly questioned.
In recent months, a growing number of crypto traders have been attracted to bots integrated into the messaging app Telegram, such as Unibot. However, there are security concerns, particularly regarding the way these bots manage user resources.
Last month, Unibot’s recently deployed router contract was exploited, resulting in a loss of over $600,000. This was due to a critical security flaw that allowed an intruder to use a “transferFrom()” function to empty approved tokens directly from Unibot users’ wallets. The attack was similar to the attack on Maestro, another Telegram trading bot, and resulted in a loss of about $500,000 a week earlier.
In response to security, the team acknowledges that while Alfred aims for a non-custodial experience, it may not provide the same level of security as hardware wallets or web-based wallets. Rather, it’s about making the exchange user-friendly, protecting it from front-running, and ensuring that user accounts are relatively safe from potential malicious incidents.
The team behind Alfred is considering different revenue models since the bot will not have its own token. This may include introducing a service fee for transactions made through the bot.
© 2023 The Block. All rights reserved. This article is for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to constitute legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.
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