The ill-famed pseudnoymous trader Jaredfromsubway.eth, who stole millions in crypto last year after deploying maximal extractable value (MEV) bots to carry out sandwich attacks, is reportedly back.
While the MEV bot associated with Jared has seen trading volume drop to near zero in August, researchers at onchain analytics firm EigenPhi have reason to believe that a “Jared 2.0” bot could be lurking with more advanced strategies in place.
MEV sandwich attacks are a form of front-running where a bot exploits an anticipated price change by executing a “sandwich trade” around a large pending transaction, profiting from the resulting artificial price movement.
Prior attacks from Jared resulted in them being one of the top guzzlers of gas on the Ethereum network, spending $7 million in gas fees over the course of two months to execute them. Since Jared’s bot first appeared in March 2023, it has made a profit of at least $22 million.
“During the past 2 weeks, we have noticed an emerging MEV contract rampaging with all kinds of new onchain trade squeezing methods,” said EigenPhi researchers in a blog.
They found that a new wallet address was created by the same externally owned account (EOA) that produced Jared’s old bot, and since then, has cooked at least 40,000 sandwiches which generated 765 ETH ($1.97 million) rewards.
EigenPhi researchers claim that this new bot has “new recipes,” which include five-layer and seven-layer sandwich attacks. These attacks would impact multiple unsuspecting victims through a combination of transactions, with a higher level of sophistication that has even impacted EigenPhi’s ability to track how much profit these sandwich bots make.
“Jared’s new tricks disrupt our PnL calculation of sandwiches, and we are working on revision,” said EigenPhi.
Last year, a coalition of Ethereum projects came together to launch an MEV Blocker — a tool that Ethereum users can use to protect themselves against MEV bot attacks. With the customer Remote Call Procedure (RPC) endpoint added to crypto wallets, users will be shielded from MEV bots that extract value from their transactions, at the expense of transactions taking around 10% longer than they normally would.
August 21, 2024, 6:00 a.m. ET: The introduction of this article has been updated to provide more context.
