An anonymous Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) bot operator made more than $1 million this week by performing a “sandwich attack” on buyers and sellers of two new memecoins.
According to an April 19 tweet, the wallet address is linked to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain "jaredfromsubway.eth," which made $950,000 in profits from a sandwich attack on April 18, and between April 17 and On the 19th, the Profits were approximately USD 300,000 and USD 400,000 respectively. Sealaunch, a non-fungible token data platform.
The bot's ENS domain may be a tongue-in-cheek nod to the popular sandwich chain and its disgraced former spokesperson, Jared Fogle. In a separate post, Sealaunch explained that over a 24-hour period on April 18-19, MEV bots spent 7% of all Ethereum gas fees.
A large portion of the profits came from attacks on trading activity related to two new meme coins, Pepe (PEPE) and Wojak (WOJAK), which helped propel jared from subway.eth to become the top gas guzzler over the past day and week, Crypto researcher Matt Willemsen explained: A sandwich attack occurs when an attacker "sandwiches" a victim's transaction between two of his own to manipulate prices and profits from users.
This is possible because the victim's transaction is first sent to the mempool, waiting to be added to the next block. At the same time, the attacker sets up a transaction with a high gas fee - to ensure it is accepted first - and sets up another transaction with a lower gas fee to ensure it is accepted after the victim's transaction. The attacker profited by buying the victim's token at a price below market value, then selling it within the same block receiving the difference between the transaction revenue and the gas fee .
According to data shared by Thomas Mattimore, head of the Reserve Protocol platform, jared fromsubway.eth made a huge profit from spending nearly $1.2 million on gas between April 18 and 19. MEV robot operators spent more than $7 million in gas fees in 180,000 transactions According to Sealaunch.
While some found humor in the MEV bot's domain and behavior, not everyone was happy. An analyst at on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has questioned the "value" of the jobs jaredfromsubway.eth is offering the world. Other Twitter users went a step further , expressing their hatred and frustration for the MEV robot operators.
