An anonymous Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot operator made over $1 million this week by executing “sandwich attacks” against buyers and sellers of two new meme coins, PEPE and WOJAK. Here are the details…
$1 million profit with WOJAK and PEPE
According to an April 19 tweet from token data platform Sealaunch, the wallet address associated with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain “jaredfromsubway.eth” earned $950,000 from “sandwich attacks” on April 18, and on April 17 and 19 respectively. made a profit of approximately $300,000 and $400,000. The bot’s ENS domain name appears to be inspired by the popular fast-food chain Subway.
If you are trading NEET, PEPE, APED or any of the following, consider using a MEV blocker or @CoWSwap to avoid getting sandwich attacked pic.twitter.com/YYqloQVBKR
— sealaunch.xyz (@SeaLaunch_) April 19, 2023
Sealaunch explained that during a 24-hour period from April 18-19, 7 percent of all Ethereum gas fees were spent by the MEV bot. Crypto researcher Matt Willemsen says the bulk of the profits will come from attacks on trading activities related to two new meme coins, Pepe (PEPE) and Wojak (WOJAK), which helped jaredfromsubway.eth become the top gas user in the past day and week. announced his arrival.
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
How does a sandwich attack happen?
As we have also reported as Kriptokoin.com, a sandwich attack occurs when an attacker “squeezes” the victim’s transaction between his two transactions, that is, “sandwiches” it, in order to manipulate the price and 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 one transaction with a high gas fee to get accepted first, and another transaction with a lower gas fee to get the victim’s transaction accepted.
The attacker makes a profit by buying the victim’s token at a cheaper price than market value, then sells it within the same block – receiving the difference between the revenue from the transaction and the gas fees. According to data shared by Reserve Protocol platform head Thomas Mattimore, the huge profits pocketed by jaredfromsubway.eth resulted from approximately $1.2 million spent on gas fees from April 18-19.
MEV bots get investors in trouble
According to Sealaunch, the MEV bot operator spent over $7 million in gas fees on 180,000 transactions. While some have fun with the name and actions of the MEV bot, not all are happy. An analyst at on-chain analytics firm Glassnode questioned the “value” of the work jaredfromsubway.eth is providing to the world. Other Twitter users went a step further and expressed their hatred and disappointment towards the MEV bot operator.
According to MEV Blocker, so far MEV bots have drawn more than $1.38 billion from Ethereum users trying to trade, provide liquidity and print NFTs. Several MEV Block projects have been launched in recent months to help protect Ethereum users from sandwich attacks.
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