An anonymous Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot operator has made over $1 million this week by executing “sandwich attacks” against buyers and sellers of two new memecoins.
The wallet address, linked to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain “jaredfromsubway.eth”, made $950,000 from the sandwich attacks on April 18, and made about $300,000 and $400,000 on April 17 and 19, respectively, according to an April 19 tweet from non-fungible token data platform Sealaunch.
After closing the day of yesterday with a profit close to $1M, jaredfromsubway.eth MEV bot is already profiting close to $400K today pic.twitter.com/VxouxAc59s
— sealaunch.xyz (@SeaLaunch_) April 19, 2023
After closing yesterday with a profit close to USD 1 million, jaredfromsubway.eth the MEV bot has already made close to USD 400,000 today.
The bot’s ENS dominance is likely an ironic nod to the popular sandwich chain and its former spokesperson, Jared Fogle.
During a 24-hour period between April 18 and 19, the MEV bot spent 7% of all Ethereum gas fees, according to explained Sealaunch in another post.
A large part of the profits came from attacks on trading activity related to two new memecoins, Pepe (PEPE) and Wojak (WOJAK), which has helped propel jaredfromsubway.eth into the biggest guzzler of gas over the past day and week, crypto researcher Matt Willemsen explained:
Wondering why gas is so damn high?
jaredfromsubway.eth (lmao) is absolutely cleaning up by sandwich-attacking $PEPE and $WOJAK trading activity. They are #1 gas spender over the past day and week.
MEV sandwich bots on Ethereum have made $100M+ since the weekend. https://t.co/qhxyxlac20
—Matt Willemsen (@matt_willemsen) April 19, 2023
Do you wonder why the gas is so high? jaredfromsubway.eth (lmao) is absolutely cleaning up attacking the trading activity of $PEPE and $WOJAK. It is the #1 gas spender in the last day and week. MEV sandwich bots on Ethereum have earned over $100 million since the weekend.
A sandwich attack occurs when an attacker “sandwiches” a victim’s transaction between their own two transactions in order to manipulate the price to profit from the user.
This is possible because the victim’s transaction is first sent to the mempool, where it waits to be added to the next block. Meanwhile, the attacker sets up a transaction with a high gas rate – to ensure it is accepted first – and another transaction with a lower gas rate to ensure it is accepted after the victim’s transaction.
The attacker benefits by buying the token from the victim at a price cheaper than the market value, and then sells it within the same block, taking the difference between the income of the transaction minus the gas rates.
The big profits pocketed by jaredfromsubway.eth come from almost $1.2 million spent on gas fees between April 18 and 19, according to the data shared by Thomas Mattimore, platform head of the Reserve Protocol.
According to sealaunch, the operator of the MEV bot has spent more than USD 7 million in gas fees in 180,000 transactions.
although some find grace in the domain name and actions of the MEV bot, not everyone is happy.
An analyst at on-chain analytics firm Glassnode questioned the “value” of the work that jaredfromsubway.eth is providing to the world.
Other Twitter users went a step further, expressing his hatred and frustration towards the operator of the MEV bot.
when i see jaredfromsubway.eth on the shitcoin i just aped my entire networth into pic.twitter.com/heK4bnbikf
– DRT (@pepeDRT) April 19, 2023
When I see jaredfromsubway.eth on the shitcoin I just plowed all my money into.
According to MEV Blocker, MEV bots have mined over $1.38 billion from Ethereum users trying to trade, provide liquidity and mint NFTs.
Several MEV Blocker projects have been released in recent months to help protect Ethereum users from sandwich attacks.
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