'JaredfromSubway' bot front runs Vitalik Buterin's $4 token swap with $1 million in volume

The Ethereum co-founder, who has spent months campaigning against toxic MEV with proposals for encrypted mempools, just had one of his own swaps front-run and back-run by the network's most notorious sandwich bot. 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.(Coindesk)