2023-04-21 06:03:10
The operator of an anonymous Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot reaped well over $1 million this week by conducting “sandwich attacks” against buyers and sellers of two new memecoins.
The wallet address associated with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain “jaredfromsubway.eth” made $950,000 on April 18 with sandwich attacks. And on April 17th and 19th, he made about $300,000 and $400,000 in profits, according to an April 19th tweet by an NFT data platform called Sealaunch.
The bot’s ENS domain is likely a reference to the popular sandwich fast food restaurant and its disgraced former spokesperson, Jared Fogle.
In the 24-hour period between April 18 and 19, the MEV bot spent 7% of all Ethereum gas fees, Sealaunch explained in a separate post.
Most of the gains came from attacks on trading activity for the two new memecoins, Pepe (PEPE) and Wojak (WOJAK). This has contributed greatly to making jaredfromsubway.eth the biggest gas consumer over the past week, cryptoanalyst Matt Willemsen explained:
A sandwich attack occurs when the attacker “sandwiches” the victim’s transaction between two of his own transactions. It manipulates the price and takes advantage of the user. This is possible by first putting the victim’s transaction into the mempool, where it waits to be added to the next block. Meanwhile, the attacker sets up a transaction with a high gas fee – to ensure that it is accepted first. He then sets up another transaction with a lower gas fee to ensure it is accepted after the victim’s transaction.
The attacker pocketed more than 1 million dollars
The attacker profits by buying the victim’s token cheaper than the market value and then selling it in the same block. In the meantime, he deducts the difference between the income from the transaction and the gas fees.
Jaredfromsubway.eth spent nearly $1.2 million in gas fees between April 18th and 19th in transactions made by jaredfromsubway.eth. This was demonstrated by the data shared by Thomas Mattimore, platform manager of Reserve Protocol.
The MEV bot is operated by Sealaunch according to Over 180,000 transactions spent over $7 million in gas fees..
The crypto community is hooked on this scam
While some people find the MEV bot’s domain name and actions humorous, not everyone is happy about it.
An employee of the Glassnode on-chain analytics company questioned the “value” of the work jaredfromsubway.eth is providing to the world.
Other Twitter users took it a step further and expressed their hatred and frustration towards the operator of the MEV bot.
According to MEV Blocker, MEV bots have caused more than $1.38 billion in losses to Ethereum users.
Several MEV Block projects have been launched in recent months to help protect Ethereum users from sandwich attacks.
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