The MEV gods do not discriminate.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder and strong advocate of fixing the toxic maximum extractable value, was hit by the same type of attack he has been campaigning against, blockchain data from earlier this week shows.
Data shows that a Buterin transaction on April 30 was interleaved by the bot in block 24993038, according to Etherscan data, resulting in a worse execution price for the Ethereum co-founder.
A sandwich attack occurs when a bot detects a trader’s pending transaction, places its own buy order in front to drive the price up, allows the victim to execute at the inflated price, and then dumps the tokens immediately afterwards to pocket the difference. Usually the victim doesn’t even notice, as it simply fills up a little worse than it should.
CoinDesk analysis shows that Buterin exchanged 26,544 Digital Bit Tokens (XDB) worth approximately $3.86 for 0.00197 ETH worth $4.56. The robot ran $1.14 million worth of WETH through SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 to manipulate the price of XDB between the two pools just before Buterin’s trade landed.
After the $5.14 gas fees, Jared appears to have lost money on this particular sandwich, and Buterin’s slip 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 few months pitching encrypted mempools as a solution to toxic MEVs in Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap.
MEV is the profit that whoever orders transactions on a blockchain can pocket by reorganizing them. Anyone running a bot that looks at the public mempool, the place where pending transactions are located before being added to a block, can spot opportunities to insert their own trades around someone else’s.
Sandwich attacks are the most aggressive form: the cumulative MEV mined on Ethereum now exceeds $1.2 billion and these types of attacks represent approximately 51% of the total volume.
Buterin, among other developers, argues that MEV creates a hidden tax on regular users that can favor large, specialized operators over everyone else.
Jaredfromsubway.eth rose to prominence in 2023 as it featured meme coin traders like pepe and wojak during the then meme frenzy.
It briefly accounted for 7% of all gas rates on the network in April of that year and has reportedly siphoned more than $7 million from victims in hundreds of thousands of transactions since then.
The bot adapts faster than the protocols that try to stop it. It has survived contract updates, mempool leaks, and several attempts by builders to design exploits that drain your funds.
