The MEV gods do not discriminate.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder and a vocal proponent of setting toxic maximum extractable value, was hit by exactly the kind of attack he has campaigned against, blockchain data from earlier this week shows.
Data shows that a transaction by Buterin on April 30 was squashed by the bot at block 24993038, according to Etherscan data, resulting in a worse execution price for the Ethereum co-founder.
A sandwich attack is when a bot detects a trader’s pending transaction, places its own buy order in front to push up the price, lets the victim execute at the high price, and then dumps tokens immediately after to pocket the difference. The victim usually doesn’t notice it themselves, as they just get a slightly worse filling than they should have.
Analysis from CoinDesk shows that Buterin exchanged 26,544 digitalbits (XDB) tokens worth about $3.86 for 0.00197 ETH worth $4.56. The bot ran $1.14 million worth of WETH through SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 to manipulate the XDB price between the two pools just before Buterin’s swap landed.
After gas fees of $5.14, Jared appears to have lost money on this particular sandwich, and Buterin’s drop was probably a few cents.
This shows that the bot is so industrialized that it scans every pending transaction in the mempool for any opportunity to insert itself, profitable or not.
Buterin has spent the last several months pitching encrypted mempools as a solution to toxic MEV in Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap.
MEV is the profit that anyone ordering transactions on a blockchain can rake in by reshuffling them. Anyone running a bot that sees the public mempool, the holding pen where pending transactions sit before being added to a block, can see opportunities to insert their own trades around someone else’s.
Sandwich attacks are the most aggressive form, with cumulative MEV mined on Ethereum now exceeding $1.2 billion, and this type of attack accounting for around 51% of the total volume.
Buterin, among other developers, argues that MEV creates a hidden tax on ordinary users that may favor large, specialized operators over everyone else.
Jaredfromsubway.eth rose to prominence in 2023 when it squashed meme coin traders like pepe and wojak during the meme frenzy of the time.
It briefly accounted for 7% of all gas charges on the network in April of that year and has reportedly extracted more than $7 million from victims across hundreds of thousands of transactions since.
The bot adapts faster than the protocols that try to stop it. It has survived contract upgrades, mempool filtering, and numerous attempts by developers to design exploits that drain its funds.
