Dedicated Arbitrage Shard

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In light of the Harmony team’s announcement of a dedicated “Game Shard”, I was thinking it might be a good idea to also have a dedicated “Arbitrage Shard” to insulate against bot attacks.

It could be programmed so any address exceeding a certain number of transactions per second would be automatically routed to the Arbitrage Shard to ensure the other shards wouldn’t be bogged down by spam attacks. Kind of how some game devs identify cheaters and put them on dedicated servers so they’re only griefing each-other without inconveniencing everyone else.

It would also allow Harmony to lower gas fees (not that they’re high, but they used to be lower before they raised them to deter bots). Maybe they could even lower gas fees on the other shards but RAISE gas fees on the Arbitrage Shard to further discourage spam and troll the trolls.

I understand the bot attacks aren’t really an issue NOW, but when the bear market is done, interest ramps back up and Harmony gains more popularity, it would be in their best interest if they didn’t fall victim to the user headaches other blockchains suffer from. Nothing kills momentum like outages and bottlenecks. Plus if Harmony should be synonymous with anything it’s “ease of use”.

The ideal time to solve a problem is before it becomes a problem, so for all those reasons, I personally think it would be in Harmony’s best interest to have an arbitrage shard operational BEFORE it’s needed. The reputation of reliability would set Harmony apart.

Thoughts?

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Spam shard is actually a good idea lol. Shard where suspicius bot transactions are sent.

But idk how the cross chain transactions work.

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The problem is with front-running. It would be interesting to have a front-run resistant shard, but that is quite difficult to do cuz then the mempool cannot be public…

For me, arbitrage is more about flash loans and DEXes, if there was a front-running resistant shard that could call other shard’s smart contracts, that would be the killer cuz Aave is on shard 0 so I could keep using those flash loans but still keep the opportunities for myself.

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I have no idea what it would require to pull off, but it would certainly be novel, innovative and effective if they succeeded.

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I like this idea. We can have Shard 2 dedicated specifically for Dexs and what not. Would love to see if this would help with congestion. I believe it has potential. @dpagan-harmony Any thoughts? I know front runners and bots are the main problem.

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I like the point of view you’re exposing here [poll]

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Sounds like a great idea would love to see the outcome of possible considerations surrounding this.

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The only thing that could work is a DEX shard. But a ‘arbitrage shard’ or ‘spam shard’ doesn’t work, as these transactions will happens where the Liquidity is. If you do a cross-shard transactions (as far as I’m aware), the transaction needs to be tracked on both shards anyways, so you gain 0.

I like how chains like AVAX and Polkadot keep their “main shard” quite clean and then run sidechains that can execute smart contracts or add other custom functionality.

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