The MEV gods do not discriminate.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and strong advocate of toxic maximum extractable value setting, was hit by the very type of attack he was campaigning against, blockchain data from earlier this week shows.
The data shows that a transaction made by Buterin on April 30 was sandwiched 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 spots a trader’s pending trade, places its own buy order in front of it to drive up the price, lets the victim execute at the inflated price, then dumps the chips immediately afterward to pocket the difference. The victim usually doesn’t even notice it, as they simply receive a slightly worse filling than they should have.
CoinDesk analysis shows that Buterin traded 26,544 digitalbits (XDB) tokens worth approximately $3.86 for 0.00197 ETH worth $4.56. The bot managed $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 arrived.
After a $5.14 gas charge, Jared appears to have lost money on this particular sandwich, and Buterin’s slippage was probably pennies.
This shows that the bot is so industrialized that it scans every pending transaction in the memory pool looking for any opportunity to insert itself, profitable or not.
Buterin has spent the last few months proposing encrypted memory pools as a solution to toxic MEV in Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap.
MEV is the profit that the person ordering transactions on a blockchain can pocket by reshuffling them. Anyone running a bot that monitors the public memory pool, the enclosure where pending transactions sit before being added to a block, can spot opportunities to insert their own transactions around someone else’s.
Sandwich attacks are the most aggressive form, with the cumulative MEV mined on Ethereum now exceeding $1.2 billion and these types of attacks accounting for approximately 51% of the total volume.
Buterin, among other developers, says MEV creates a hidden tax on regular users that can favor large, specialized operators over everyone else.
Jaredfromsubway.eth rose to prominence in 2023 by sandwiching coin traders like Pepe and Wojak during the meme frenzy of the time.
It briefly accounted for 7% of all gas fees on the network in April of that year and has since allegedly extracted more than $7 million from victims across hundreds of thousands of transactions.
The robot adapts faster than the protocols that try to stop it. It has survived contractual upgrades, memory pool filtering, and several attempts by manufacturers to engineer exploits that drain its funds.
