Vitalik Buterin gets sandwiched by 'JaredfromSubway' as Ethereum MEV risks linger

The Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, a prominent advocate against toxic Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), was subjected to a sandwich attack by the 'JaredfromSubway' bot. This attack involved the bot front-running and back-running Buterin's swap of 26,544 digitalbits (XDB) tokens. The bot manipulated the price of XDB on decentralized exchanges like SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 before and after Buterin's transaction, resulting in a worse execution price for him. Although the bot's profit on this specific transaction was minimal after gas fees, it demonstrates the bot's sophisticated ability to scan and exploit pending transactions in the mempool. This incident underscores the persistent MEV risks on Ethereum, which developers are attempting to address through proposals like encrypted mempools, as sandwich attacks constitute a significant portion of the total MEV extracted on the network.

(Source：CoinDesk)