A notorious maximal extractable value (MEV) bot is back and has been upgraded to carry out even more sophisticated “sandwich” attacks.
The MEV bot that goes by “jaredfromsubway.eth” — which raked in millions of dollars in crypto through arbitrage and “sandwich” attacks in early 2023 — has been enhanced.
On Aug. 20, MEV tracking site EigenPhi reported a new MEV contract has emerged with new tactics and more sophisticated multi-layered sandwich attacks on DeFi protocols — which schedules a transaction in front of and behind a victim’s transaction to manipulate prices and profit from the victim.
“During the past two weeks, we have noticed an emerging MEV contract rampaging with all kinds of new onchain trade squeezing methods.”
The bot is an automated trading system that exploits vulnerabilities in DeFi protocols to generate profits. Its new attacks involve executing multiple transactions within the same block to manipulate the exchange rates in a Uniswap V3 pool, resulting in profits for Jared’s bot at the expense of other users.
The new MEV bot uses more advanced techniques, such as adding and removing liquidity in the DEX pool as part of the sandwich attack, making it more difficult to analyze and track the profitability of its strategies, EigenPhi noted.
“Jared 2.0 would use adding liquidity transactions as the front piece and/or the centerpiece and removing liquidity transactions as the back piece,” EigenPhi wrote.
EigenPhi added the activity on the original jaredfromsubway contract address used to execute the bot’s trading strategies and paid out around $2.2 million to other bots or traders over a two-week period beginning Aug. 1.
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Its activity then saw a significant decrease since Aug. 7 and dropped to zero on Aug. 14.
EigenPhi data indicates that sandwich attack volume has exceeded $17 billion over the past month days.
The MEV bot’s name is a reference to Jared Fogle, the disgraced former spokesperson for the fast food chain Subway who was convicted in 2015 on charges relating to sexual conduct with a minor and child sexual abuse material.
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