The MEV gods do not discriminate. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, a vocal advocate for fixing toxic maximal extractable value, got hit by the very sort of attack he has been campaigning against — a sandwich attack executed by the notorious bot Jaredfromsubway.eth.
A $4 swap triggers a $1.14M trading maneuver
Blockchain data shows that on April 30, Buterin swapped 26,544 digitalbits (XDB) tokens worth roughly $3.86 for 0.00197 ETH valued at $4.56. Just before his transaction landed in block 24993038, the Jaredfromsubway bot routed $1.14 million worth of WETH through SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 to distort the XDB price between the two pools. After Buterin's swap executed at the inflated price, the bot could have dumped, but the outcome was unusual: after paying $5.14 in gas fees, Jared appears to have lost money on this particular sandwich. Buterin's slippage was likely just a few cents.
This incident underscores how industrialized MEV bots have become: they indiscriminately scan every pending transaction in the mempool for any opportunity to insert themselves, regardless of profitability.
How sandwich attacks work — and why they matter
A sandwich attack is the most aggressive form of MEV. A bot spots a trader's pending order, places its own buy order ahead to push the price up, lets the victim execute at the inflated price, then immediately sells the tokens to pocket the difference. Victims often notice only a slightly worse fill. Cumulative MEV extracted on Ethereum now exceeds $1.2 billion, with sandwich attacks accounting for roughly 51% of total MEV volume.
Buterin has spent recent months pitching encrypted mempools as a fix for toxic MEV in Ethereum's 2026 roadmap. He argues that MEV creates a hidden tax on regular users and favors large, specialized operators. Jaredfromsubway.eth rose to prominence in 2023 by sandwiching meme coin traders during the frenzy around pepe and wojak. At its peak that April, it accounted for 7% of all gas fees on the network and has reportedly extracted over $7 million from hundreds of thousands of transactions since. The bot has survived contract upgrades, mempool filtering, and even exploits designed to drain its funds.