// the find
flashbots/mev-inspect-rs
Discover historic Miner Extractable Value (MEV) opportunities
A Rust tool from Flashbots for replaying historical Ethereum blocks and extracting MEV opportunities — arbitrage, liquidations, sandwich trades — by parsing transaction traces against known protocol ABIs. Aimed at researchers and quant analysts studying on-chain MEV, not at builders trying to capture it in real time.
Protocol coverage is solid for 2021-era DeFi: Uniswap v2/v3 clones, Curve, Balancer, Aave, Compound, dYdX, and 0x are all implemented with dedicated inspectors. The inspector/reducer architecture is clean — inspectors classify individual calls, reducers assemble them into higher-level MEV types, which makes adding a new protocol straightforward. Trace caching to disk avoids re-fetching from the archive node on repeated runs, which matters when a full archive node query costs real money. Test fixtures are actual mainnet trace JSON files, so tests cover real historical cases rather than synthetic ones.
Abandoned — last commit was November 2022, before EIP-1559 fully reshaped MEV economics and before most modern MEV research moved to MEV-Share and SUAVE. No support for Uniswap v3, which had already overtaken v2 by the time this went quiet. Requires a full archive node with `debug_traceTransaction` enabled, which rules out most RPC providers unless you're running your own node or paying for a premium endpoint. The README is essentially empty and the external docs link points to Flashbots' site, which has since reorganized — expect dead links.