What to know : Vitalik Buterin, a leading critic of toxic maximal extractable value (MEV), was himself targeted by a sandwich attack on April 30, blockchain data show. In the incident, a bot known as jaredfromsubway.eth sandwiched Buterin’s small swap of digitalbits (XDB) for ether, using about $1.14 million in WETH to manipulate prices across SushiSwap and Uniswap. The episode shows how industrialized MEV bots relentlessly scan the public mempool for opportunities—profitable or not—and bolsters Buterin’s push for encrypted mempools as a 2026 Ethereum roadmap priority.
The MEV gods do not discriminate.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder and a vocal advocate for fixing toxic maximal extractable value, got hit by the very kind of attack he has been campaigning against, blockchain data from earlier this week shows.
Data shows a transaction by Buterin on April 30 was sandwiched by the bot in block 24993038, per Etherscan data, resulting in a worse execution price for the Ethereum co-founder.
A sandwich attack is when a bot spots a trader's pending transaction, places its own buy order in front to push the price up, lets the victim execute at the inflated price, then dumps the tokens immediately after to pocket the difference. The victim usually does not even notice, as they just get a slightly worse fill than they should have.
Analysis by CoinDesk shows Buterin swapped 26,544 digitalbits (XDB) tokens worth roughly $3.86 for 0.00197 ETH worth $4.56. The bot ran $1.14 million worth of WETH through SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 to manipulate the XDB price between the two pools right before Buterin's swap landed.
After gas fees of $5.14, Jared appears to have lost money on this particular sandwich, and Buterin's slippage was likely in a few cents.
This shows the bot is so industrialized that it scans every pending transaction in the mempool for any opportunity to insert itself, profitable or not.
Buterin has spent the past several months pitching encrypted mempools as a fix for toxic MEV in Ethereum's 2026 roadmap.
MEV is the profit that whoever orders transactions on a blockchain can pocket by reshuffling them. Anyone running a bot that watches the public mempool, the holding pen where pending transactions sit before being added to a block, can spot opportunities to insert their own trades around someone else's.
Sandwich attacks are the most aggressive form, with cumulative MEV extracted on Ethereum is now over $1.2 billion and these type of attacks accounting for roughly 51% of the total volume.
Buterin, among other developers, argue that MEV creates a hidden tax on regular users that can favour large, specialized operators over everyone else.
Jaredfromsubway.eth rose to prominence in 2023 as it sandwiched traders of meme coins like pepe and wojak during the then meme frenzy.
It briefly accounted for 7% of all gas fees on the network in April that year, and has reportedly extracted more than $7 million from victims across hundreds of thousands of transactions since.
The bot adapts faster than the protocols trying to stop it. It has survived contract upgrades, mempool filtering, and several attempts by builders to design exploits that drain its funds.
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