A trader using an anonymous Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot has reportedly made over $1 million in just a week by executing “sandwich attacks” on buyers and sellers of two new meme coins. The wallet address was linked to an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain called “jaredfromsubway.eth”.
The bot apparently used the sandwich attack method to profit by taking advantage of trading activity of the two meme coins, Pepe (PEPE) and Wojak (WOJAK). The trading activity helped jaredfromsubway.eth become the biggest spender of Ethereum gas fees over the last day and week, according to crypto researcher Matt Willemsen.
Sandwich attacks typically involve setting up one transaction with a high gas fee to ensure it is accepted first, and another transaction with a lower gas fee to ensure it is accepted after the victim’s transaction.
The victim’s transaction is first sent to the mempool where it waits to be added to the next block. Meanwhile, the attacker buys the victim’s token at a price cheaper than market value and then sells it within the same block, taking in the difference between the revenue from the transaction minus the gas fees.
Such incidents raise questions about the fairness and transparency of trading in the cryptocurrency space. Some experts suggest that decentralised finance protocols and the Ethereum network need to address the vulnerability of their systems to such attacks.
