Jaredfromsubway.eth’s MEV bot rakes in $34 million in three months

An MEV bot run by a pseudonymous crypto individual named after a jailed sex offender made $34 million in arbitrage and sandwich attacks in the last three months, according to a report by MEV tracking site EigenPhi.

A person going by Jaredfromsubway.eth — a reference to the former spokesperson for sandwich chain Subway who was sentenced to 15 years for sex crimes — created the bot in February. It quickly found traction by sandwiching other crypto users and outperforming rival MEV bots, a term for blockchain-based high frequency trading algorithms. 

As the bot has become more active, its transactions can now be found in more than 60% of Ethereum blocks, according to EigenPhi.

“Their success can be attributed to skill, strategy and tech,” a pseudonymous crypto developer called Nox said on Twitter this week. “Jared’s bot identifies more MEV opportunities and executes transactions faster than competitors.”

A sandwich attack is where a fast crypto user observes a pending transaction about to be processed on the blockchain. They then bundle that transaction with two of their own — one before the transaction and one after it — and submit that bundle to a blockchain validator who processes it, for a fee. The two transactions are designed to manipulate the market in a way that makes the original transaction less profitable and in turn boosts the attacker’s own profits.

Jaredfromsubway’s MEV bot

Jaredfromsubway.eth’s bot has run a total of 238,000 attacks with more than 106,000 victims, according to EigenPhi. It has generated revenue of $40 million and paid $6 million in transaction fees, leaving it with proceeds of $34 million.

The bot’s success appears to be driving out rivals. In the Flashbots Discord, an MEV bot owner called Yannick said that Jaredfromsubway.eth was willing to pay a higher percentage of the proceeds from the attacks to validators. “I was bribing 97% for months until he appeared and bribed 99.9%,” they said.

Yannick noted that Jaredfromsubway.eth’s attacks were effective because they would sandwich several tokens in a single transaction and add arbitrage opportunities at the end of the bundles. Yannick said that, in response, they were planning to shut down their own MEV bot.

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