Anti-aircraft guns shooting mosquitoes, robots using millions of dollars to clip Vitalik's cents

BlockBeats News, May 8 — The bot “JaredfromSubway” recently successfully attacked a small token swap involving Vitalik. Vitalik originally exchanged 26,544 XDB tokens worth about $3.86 for approximately $4.56 worth of ETH. As a result, the bot used about $1.14 million in WETH to conduct large trades between SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 liquidity pools, manipulating the XDB price and causing worse slippage for Vitalik’s transaction. The entire MEV attack involved around $1 million in trading volume, causing only a few cents of loss to Vitalik. After deducting $5.14 in gas fees, the bot incurred a slight loss.

Ironically, Vitalik has long publicly opposed “toxic MEV” and has strongly promoted the use of encrypted mempools as a solution in the Ethereum roadmap for 2026. MEV has accumulated over $1.2 billion in extracted user value, with sandwich attacks accounting for 51%, essentially imposing an invisible tax on ordinary users through public mempools. The aforementioned bot JaredfromSubway has been known since 2023 for sandwiching meme coin trades, occupying up to 7% of Ethereum’s gas fees, with total profits exceeding $7 million. This time, even Vitalik was not spared.