Permissionless contracts, including the contracts behind a Manta Bridge, attract automated bots because their callable rules, visible state, and public transaction flow turn profitable behavior into a repeatable machine task: a bot can discover an opportunity, simulate the call, pay gas, and submit the same action faster and more consistently than a person. The wider Manta Bridge context is linked at cryptoquant.com.
What bots actually use
The overlooked feature is the event log. A Solidity contract can emit an event when a deposit, claim, swap, or state transition occurs; nodes keep its indexed topics and data in transaction receipts, allowing an off-chain process to filter events instead of repeatedly reading every account. An event does not authorize a caller or change state, but it provides a cheap trigger for automation.
A bot then combines the log with RPC reads and the contract's ABI. It calls view functions through eth_call, reconstructs the relevant state, checks whether the transaction would still succeed, and submits a signed transaction only when expected value exceeds gas and failure risk. On Ethereum Mainnet, a pending transaction may also reveal a race. On Manta Pacific, the same EVM-shaped workflow applies even though its data-availability stack uses Celestia Network.
Why permissionlessness is the trigger
Permissionlessness removes the permission step, not the cost step. An external account or another contract can call a public or external function, but it still needs a valid signature, enough gas, and every require check must pass. That predictable boundary is exactly what software likes: the bot does not negotiate with an operator or wait for a dashboard.
This event-driven path replaces the long way: polling balances, scraping a dashboard, or asking a person to click after each deposit. It is useful for settlement, liquidations, rebalancing, bridge relaying, and alerts when the contract makes its success condition machine-readable.
How to design around bots
The fix is to treat every write as an adversarial public API. Authenticate privileged roles, bind claims to a beneficiary and nonce, enforce deadlines and slippage limits, and make replay impossible. If an action is first-come or price-sensitive, assume its transaction can be observed and use commit-reveal or an ordering design that does not depend on secrecy.
Common questions
Does a public function invite theft?
No. Public visibility only makes the entry point callable; ownership, allowance, balance, nonce, and pause checks still decide whether the call can change state.
Can bots call view functions?
Yes, and that is normally harmless. eth_call reads node state without sending a transaction or paying gas. The risk begins when a profitable write lacks authorization or economic bounds.
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