Mysterious Ethereum ($ETH) MEV Bot Makes Over $40 Million ‘Attacking’ Crypto Traders

A mysterious entity on the Ethereum ($ETH) blockchain has caught the attention of the cryptocurrency community over the last few months after it started making millions of dollars and consuming a large percentage of the network’s gas fees, while operating a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot.

According to a recently published report by blockchain data analysis firm EigenPhi, the operator of the MEV bot jaredfromsubway has been taking advantage of traders on the Ethereum blockchain since February 27, and has since made a staggering $40.6 million in revenue, and $34.5 million in profit.

Data from Dune Analytics shows that the MEV bot, expended about 3,720 ETH or $950,000 in the past two months, executing roughly 180,000 transactions.

The MEV bot has been wreaking havoc for Ethereum traders and has been held accountable for draining millions from investors. This has raised alarm among traders, who are increasingly concerned about which tokens to avoid.

An MEV bot, it’s worth noting, is made to take advantage of Maximal Extractable Value, which is seen as the maximum amount of value that can be extracted from every block on the Ethereum network by influencing its content or order. These bots can, for example, take advantage of decentralized exchange arbitrage opportunities, or execute sandwich attacks.

A sandwich attack sees the bot execute two transactions around those of another user to manipulate the price of an asset that the user is trying to trade and make a profit off of the price difference.

Jaredfromsubway’s bot was detected in more than 60% of all Ethereum blocks in the week starting from April 17, according to EigenPhi. The firm says that the entity sometimes used simple arbitrage strategies, but mostly focused on buying and selling tokens in its sandwich attacks. The analysis reads:

We looked into how this bot has gained a lot of attention lately and outperformed other sandwich and arbitrage bots. One of the key strategies is using many altcoins. The bot’s account has a much larger number of tokens than the sandwich bot that ranks second.

Per the firm, using a larger number of tokens gives the bot an advantage when it comes to find sandwich attack opportunities as the more tokens a bot uses “ the more chances it has to execute sandwich transactions.” At its peak, the bot was using over 800 types of tokens.

EigenPhi says that the bot didn’t earn any significant profits until April 17th, until altcoin trading volumes rose significantly. The bot notably doesn’t just perform these attacks, but it also holds onto some cryptocurrencies to bolster its profit.

As CryptoGlobe reported, jaredfromsubway recently surprised the cryptocurrency community by returning around $1.5 million worth of wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and wrapped Ethereum (WETH) that an individual unintentionally sent it.

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