BRC20 Snipping Attack

Minfeng Qi; Ningran Li; Qin Wang; Shiping Chen; Tianqing Zhu

REVIEW 3 major objections 4 minor 66 references

BRC20 Snipping Attack

T0 review · 3 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-10 · deepseek-v4-flash

Challenge this review Re-run · record.json Download PDF Read on arXiv ↗

Pith's one-line read The paper claims that any unconfirmed BRC20 purchase made through a PSBT-based marketplace can be displaced by an attacker who copies the transaction's transfer metadata and rebroadcasts it with a higher fee, defeating 'highest bidder…

desk verdict A competent formalization of PSBT-based BRC20 transfers is undermined by an invalid central attack: the experiment spends an input the attacker cannot sign, and the signature-transplant mechanism is never established. read the letter →

arxiv 2501.11942 v1 pith:5VGO5ZDV submitted 2025-01-21 cs.CR

Minfeng Qi , Qin Wang , Ningran Li , Shiping Chen , Tianqing Zhu This is my paper · ORCID

classification cs.CR

keywords BRC20PSBTmempoolsnippingfront-runningBitcointransactionstransactionfeereplacementmarketplacesecurityinscriptions

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper claims that the standard PSBT-based workflow for buying BRC20 tokens on open Bitcoin marketplaces can be hijacked by a snipping attack. An attacker who sees a pending purchase in the mempool copies its BRC20 transfer inscription and seller payment, builds a competing transaction with a higher miner fee, and broadcasts it; because Bitcoin miners select among conflicting transactions by fee, the attacker's version confirms and the buyer's transaction is discarded. The paper formalizes the PSBT transfer lifecycle and argues the attack applies to marketplaces and exchanges that use PSBTs, naming Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, and OKX. It reports a regtest implementation in which the highest-fee transaction always wins block inclusion and the BRC20 tokens move to the attacker's address. If correct, the result is that 'highest bidder wins' does not hold for unconfirmed BRC20 purchases.

What carries the argument

The load-bearing mechanism is the partially signed Bitcoin transaction (PSBT), the BIP-174 format that allows a transaction to be built and signed in stages by different parties. In the paper's model, the PSBT carries the BRC20 transfer inscription in its data/witness field, references the inscribed satoshi input, and names the seller's payment output; the Finalize step turns a fully signed PSBT into a broadcast-ready transaction. The attack couples that format with Bitcoin's fee-based mempool selection: the fee is the input-output value difference, miners prioritize higher-fee transactions, and conflicting spends of the same UTXO cannot both confirm. By keeping the inscription metadata and seller output identical while raising the fee, the attacker makes the normal block-selection rule do the front-running.

What would settle it

Check the PSBTs that Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, or OKX actually publish for a BRC20 listing: if the incomplete PSBT contains no seller signature on the inscribed input (or is never exposed to third parties), an attacker cannot finalize a competing transaction that spends that input, and the claimed applicability fails. A second test is to rerun the attack with separate wallets so the attacker controls only their own keys and receives from the marketplace only the seller-signed PSBT; if no broadcastable competing transaction can be produced, the regtest result was an artifact of a single test wallet.

Watch

Extended reading notes

Core claim

The central discovery, stated on the paper's own terms, is that a partially signed Bitcoin transaction (PSBT) carrying a BRC20 transfer is not a safe commitment to a given buyer. The seller publishes a PSBT whose data/witness field contains the transfer inscription (protocol brc-20, operation transfer, token tick, amount amt) and whose outputs credit the seller; the legitimate buyer adds a payment input, signs, and broadcasts the finalized transaction. An attacker monitors the mempool, extracts that metadata, and constructs a new PSBT with the same inscription, an equal output to the seller, a change output to the attacker, and a higher fee, then signs and broadcasts it first. Since the competing transactions conflict on the inscribed satoshi, the mempool and miners can confirm only one, and fee-based selection favors the attacker. The paper claims this defeats the 'highest bidder wins' principle on PSBT-based platforms and that the same mechanism extends to other UTXO-based inscription tokens such as Runes.

Load-bearing premise

The attack works only if a third-party attacker can obtain a partially signed PSBT that already contains the seller's valid signature on the inscribed satoshi input, and the paper assumes this exposure on Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, and OKX without demonstrating it, since its regtest experiment instead conflicts on the buyer's UTXO.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

Any unconfirmed BRC20 purchase executed through a PSBT marketplace can be displaced by an attacker who rebroadcasts the same transfer metadata at a higher fee, so a higher bid does not by itself guarantee token delivery.
The attack uses Bitcoin's standard fee-based block selection as its engine: the attacker needs no protocol bug, no miner collusion, and no private key belonging to the buyer.
Because Rune and other UTXO-based inscription tokens share the same transaction and confirmation mechanics, the paper's argument transfers the attack to them whenever those tokens are traded through visible partial transactions.
Marketplaces that want to protect buyers must either keep incomplete PSBTs out of public view, let buyers pre-authorize fee escalation, or bind the PSBT to a maximum fee commitment, as the paper's fee-locking mechanism proposes.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

The paper leaves open the exact channel by which the seller's signature enters an attacker's hands; if marketplaces instead keep PSBTs private until a buyer is chosen, the practical attack surface narrows to the buyer's own broadcast, which does not by itself give a third party the ability to spend the inscribed satoshi.
The regtest experiment, as written, has buyer and attacker both spending the buyer's UTXO from a single wallet, so a direct replication with separate wallets and a seller-signed PSBT would test whether the real-world enabler actually exists on the named platforms.
The proposed fee-locking commitment is only a proposal: Bitcoin Core does not currently enforce a maximum-fee commitment in PSBTs, so implementing it would require either a wallet-level marketplace rule or a change in how the network validates transactions.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

Quick take: the paper applies well-known fee-replacement tactics to BRC20 PSBT transfers. The formalization of the PSBT workflow is competent and the literature survey is useful, but the central attack claim doesn't survive contact with Bitcoin's signature rules. The experiment doesn't demonstrate what it claims, because it spends the buyer's UTXO (which the attacker cannot sign) and encodes the transfer in OP_RETURN rather than a real inscription.

What's actually here: first explicit framing of PSBT-based BRC20 transfers as a sniping target; a clean decomposition of the seller/buyer workflow; a reasonable summary of mempool attacks; and three mitigation ideas, of which the fee-locking commitment is the most concrete. The authors also honestly disclaim novelty for mempool sniping generally. For those reasons the paper is not without value as a survey of the area.

The soft spot is load-bearing. The attack requires the attacker to take the seller's partially signed PSBT, change the buyer input/output to raise the fee, and still spend the same inscribed satoshi. But a Bitcoin signature commits to the exact serialized transaction. Changing any input, output, or amount invalidates the seller's signature absent non-default sighash flags, and the paper never shows those flags on Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, or OKX. The experiment in §5.4 sidesteps this by constructing the attacker transaction with the buyer's UTXO (txid.b2ea) as input, but that's an input the attacker cannot sign. The resulting transaction would not be accepted by a real node. It also uses an OP_RETURN data output rather than the inscription in a taproot witness, so it isn't a BRC20 transfer at all. This is not a missing edge case; it's the core mechanism.

The formal model in §3 actually states that signatures are bound to the transaction, which makes the contradiction internal. So the evidence for the attack is invalid, and the main claim is unsupported. The mitigations are speculative but not harmful.

Who should read it: someone interested in the formalization of PSBT-based marketplaces or a checklist of mempool attacks might skim it, but not as a validated vulnerability. It deserves a rewrite to either fix the attack model (e.g., a real double-spend of the inscribed UTXO with proper signature handling) or reframe as a threat analysis without claiming a working exploit.

My recommendation: desk reject in current form. The central attack is not demonstrated, and the experimental validation is internally inconsistent. It would not be a good use of referee time until the authors repair the signature-transplant problem and reproduce the experiment with actual inscriptions and a signable input.

Referee Report

3 major / 4 minor

Summary. The manuscript formalizes the BRC20 transfer workflow through PSBTs, proposes a "BRC20 snipping attack" in which an attacker intercepts a pending PSBT, replicates its BRC20 metadata, substitutes attacker-controlled inputs and outputs, pays a higher fee, and thereby displaces the legitimate buyer's transaction, and reports a regtest experiment plus three mitigation strategies. It claims that the attack applies to Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, and OKX, and that the long-standing principle that the highest bidder wins is rendered ineffective.

Significance. If the attack worked as described, it would be a practically important vulnerability in popular BRC20 marketplaces, and the formalization of the PSBT transfer lifecycle would be a useful reference. The paper also has the merit of making its attack workflow explicit and of testing fee-based mempool conflict resolution in a controlled regtest setting. However, the central security claim rests on a signature-reuse mechanism that the paper does not establish, and the reported experiment does not actually model BRC20 transfers; as presented, the evidence does not support the stated conclusions.

major comments (3)

[§5.4, Listing 1, Listing 3, Table 3] The attacker's PSBT in Listing 3 spends the same input txid.b2ea (vout 0) as the buyer's PSBT in Listing 1, and Table 3 identifies txid.b2ea as the buyer's UTXO. The attacker does not possess the buyer's private key, so the attacker cannot produce a valid signature for that input; the transaction the attacker is said to broadcast would be rejected by consensus. The experiment therefore demonstrates mempool fee-based conflict resolution only for a transaction that no real attacker could broadcast, and the claimed replacement of the buyer's transaction is not a valid conflicting transaction.
[§4.3, Step 3–4; §3.3; §7.3] The attack narrative requires the attacker to take the seller's partially signed PSBT, alter the buyer's input and change output, and finalize it. Under BIP-174 and Bitcoin's sighash rules, a signature commits to the exact serialized transaction unless non-default SIGHASH flags such as SIGHASH_SINGLE|ANYONECANPAY are used, so the seller's partial signature cannot remain valid after the attacker substitutes a different buyer input or output. The paper cites no evidence that Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, or OKX expose seller signatures with such flags or that the seller signs only a subset of the transaction. Consequently, the central enabler of the attack, namely that a third party can finalize a competing transaction spending the same inscribed satoshi, is assumed rather than established.
[§5.1, §5.4, Listing 1, Listing 3] The experiment encodes the BRC20 transfer metadata in an OP_RETURN "data" output rather than in the taproot witness as a BRC20 inscription. OP_RETURN outputs are provably unspendable and are not admitted by BRC20 indexers as valid transfer inscriptions. The custom Python indexer crediting 1000 AK47 to the attacker's wallet is therefore an artifact of the test harness, not a demonstration that a BRC20 token transfer was hijacked. The two success criteria in §5.3 (block inclusion and token receipt) are not validated by this experiment.

minor comments (4)

[Title, Abstract, §1] The paper consistently misspells "sniping" as "snipping" in the title and abstract, and the abstract also contains typographical errors such as "legesmate transction" and "validata" in the introduction.
[§5.4, second condition] The sentence "we queried the BRC20 token balances of the attacker's wallet address (tx.f0bb)" uses a transaction identifier where an address identifier (adr.v6r9 per Table 3) is meant; this should be corrected for reproducibility.
[§6.3, Table 2] The checkmarks in Table 2 are presented without a supporting methodology or data source; the table should either be removed or accompanied by evidence that each platform broadcasts partially signed, unconfirmed PSBT transactions containing seller signatures.
[§5.4, Listings 1–4] The listings contain line breaks within base64 strings and hex strings that make them hard to verify; providing the full commands or a reproducibility script would improve the experimental presentation.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No significant circularity: the attack's validation is a direct experimental test of Bitcoin's fee-based mempool selection, with no fitted parameters, self-referential definitions, or load-bearing self-citations.

full rationale

The paper's central claim is that a higher-fee conflicting PSBT can displace a legitimate BRC20 purchase before confirmation. This is not derived from an input that already contains the conclusion; it is tested directly in a regtest environment where the attacker broadcasts a transaction with a higher fee and observes that the higher-fee transaction is confirmed while the lower-fee transaction is invalidated. The success criterion ('block inclusion' of the higher-fee transaction) matches the protocol's known fee-based selection mechanism, but that is a property of Bitcoin's mempool/mining rules, not a definitional equivalence introduced by the paper. No parameter is fitted to a subset of data and then 'predicted' on a closely related quantity. The paper explicitly disclaims novelty in the general concept of mempool sniping and positions its contribution as a PSBT/BRC20-specific application, so this is contextual application rather than renaming a known result. Self-citations appear (e.g., refs [29], [59], [63]), but they are confined to background, related work, and a reference for the two-transaction BRC20 transfer mechanism; none is invoked as the justification for the attack's validity, and no 'uniqueness theorem' or prior-work-derived ansatz is imported to force the paper's construction. Concerns about whether the experiment's attacker can legitimately sign the buyer's UTXO in practice are correctness or threat-model issues, not circularity, and are outside the scope of this pass. The derivation chain is therefore self-contained with respect to circularity.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 4 assumptions · 0 invented entities

The paper relies on standard Bitcoin assumptions (fee-based mempool selection and PSBT finalization) plus a questionable modeling assumption that a regtest transaction with OP_RETURN data represents a real BRC20 transfer.

assumptions (4)

domain assumption Bitcoin miners select transactions by fee rate.
The attack assumes a fee-competitive mempool prioritizes higher fee transactions, cited in Section 3.2 and used throughout.
domain assumption PSBTs in open BRC20 markets are visible to third parties before finalization.
The attack depends on observing or intercepting the PSBT, stated in Section 4.3 and Section 5.2 threat model.
domain assumption A party holding a partially signed PSBT can finalize it without additional authorization from the seller.
The attacker must be able to complete the seller's signature to broadcast a competing transaction; the paper does not establish this for the platforms it lists.
ad hoc to paper The regtest implementation faithfully models BRC20 transfer semantics.
The experiment uses OP_RETURN data outputs instead of taproot inscriptions, so this faithfulness is doubtful; see Section 5.4.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of BRC20 Snipping Attack." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/5VGO5ZDV

@misc{pith2026250111942,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: BRC20 Snipping Attack},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/5VGO5ZDV}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2501.11942}
}

read the original abstract

In this paper, we introduce and implement BRC20 sniping attack. Our attack manipulates the BRC20 token transfers in open markets and disrupts the fairness among bidding participants. The long-standing principle of ``highest bidder wins'' is rendered ineffective. Typically, open BRC20 token markets rely on Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT) to broadcast selling intents and wait for buying auctions. Our attack targets the BRC20 buying process (i.e., transfer) by injecting a front-running transaction to complete the full signature of the PSBT. At its core, the attack exploits the mempool's fee-based transaction selection mechanism to snipe the victim transaction, replicate metadata, and front-run the legesmate transaction. This attack applies to platforms using PSBT for BRC20 token transfers, including popular Bitcoin exchanges and marketplaces (e.g., Magic Eden, Unisat, Gate.io, OKX). We implemented and tested the attack on a Bitcoin testnet (regtest), validating its effectiveness through multiple experimental rounds. Results show that the attacker consistently replaces legitimate transactions by submitting higher-fee PSBTs. We have also made responsible disclosures to the mentioned exchanges.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2501.11942 by the authors.

**Figure 2.** Workflow of Our Snipping Attack • Step 1: Intercept the legitimate PSBT. By observing unconfirmed BRC20 transactions (often embedding JSON-like data within the witness field) in the mempool, the attacker is able to identify the legitimate buyer’s pending PSBT P. • Step 2: Parse BRC20 transfer details. Extract essential fields from P: (1) The spending inputs: {(txid(𝑖) , vout(𝑖) )}; (2) The receiving address(es) and… view at source ↗

**Figure 3.** Screenshots during our attack 9 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p009_3.png] view at source ↗

Figures from the paper (3 more)

**Figure 4.** Figure 4: Fee rate comparison in three experiments: The chart com [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p010_4.png]

**Figure 5.** Figure 5: Screenshots for Mitigation Strategies [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_5.png]

**Figure 6.** Figure 6: Bitcoin Avg. Transaction Fee vs. Transactions Per Day his [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_6.png]

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Reference graph

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