What is front-running in DeFi?

Front-running is trading ahead of an order you can see coming. On public chains, bots and traders watch visible orders and wallets and act first, at the expense of the person whose order they saw.

Also called MEV, sandwich attack or copy trading.

Why public wallets make it easy

When a wallet is public, its size, its habits and its open positions are public too. Large or regular traders get noticed, copied and traded against, and an open loan shows how close it is to liquidation.

What privacy changes

Privacy does not hide that an order exists. It hides who placed it, so an order can no longer be tied to a known wallet and everything else that wallet holds.

In Redacted

Orders from a Redacted Spending account sit on Rujira’s orderbook like any other order, but with no visible tie to your public wallet.

Private limit orders →

Related terms

OrderbookAn orderbook lists every open order to buy or sell at a set price. A limit order waits on the book until the market reaches its price, instead of trading at whatever the price is right now.Chain analysisChain analysis traces funds on public blockchains and groups addresses into likely owners, using the public record together with outside data such as exchange records, address labels and leaks.Anonymity setAn anonymity set is the group of people a given action could have come from. The larger it is, the harder it is to tell who did it.

Sources: Maximal extractable value (MEV), ethereum.org

Updated October 7, 2026. All terms