I have been researching MEV bots recently and found that many people are still quite unfamiliar with this topic. Today, I want to share some of my thoughts and insights.

Let's start with the basics. MEV stands for Miner Extractable Value, which is the value that miners can extract. Simply put, an MEV bot is a robot that performs automated interactions on the blockchain to capture value. It is completely different from traditional speculation or liquidity mining. To give an analogy, the role of MEV bots in DeFi is similar to high-frequency trading in the stock market.

When it comes to the most successful MEV bot operators, the name Jaredfromsubway.eth must be mentioned. According to statistics, his bots have executed over 238,000 attack transactions, affecting more than 106,000 victims. These numbers are indeed quite astonishing.

So, how exactly do MEV bots operate? The core method is Sandwiching attacks, also known as the sandwich attack. This approach is essentially a transfer of front-running strategies from the stock market into the DeFi space. In simple terms, a sandwich attack involves inserting your own transactions before and after a user’s transaction to profit from the price movement.

Many people now criticize sandwich attacks as a kind of malicious activity, but I believe it’s important to view this dialectically. From a negative perspective, it is pure transaction exploitation. Especially for retail investors who don’t understand the underlying blockchain logic, they often set extremely high slippage (sometimes as high as 99%), making them easy targets for MEV bots. For example, someone eager to buy a new token and become one of the first buyers might get exploited in this way.

However, from another perspective, operators of sandwich bots seem to be promoting price efficiency toward equilibrium. Economically speaking, their existence ensures that the market can meet the highest willingness to pay of consumers, and they also extract value for operators. From this angle, the existence of MEV bots is somewhat justified, even though their primary goal is self-profit.

Can sandwich attacks be avoided? Honestly, it’s impossible. As long as the market exists, such behaviors will persist. If you don’t run an MEV bot, someone else will. This is driven by profit motives. The stock market is similar—no one would say the market is unfair just because high-frequency trading exists.

Recently, a new approach has emerged. There is a tool called FlashBots, which is essentially a bot as well, but its purpose is to hide transactions from MEV bots. Currently, it seems that MEV bots and FlashBots are engaged in a kind of “arms race.”

In summary, today I mainly discussed the concepts of MEV bots and sandwich attacks. I hope this helps everyone understand this area better. There are many more details in DeFi that are worth exploring deeply. If you're interested, you can check transaction data of related projects on Gate and experience it yourself.