PANews reported on May 8th that, according to CoinDesk, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was sandwiched by the well-known sandwich attack bot jaredfromsubway.eth during a small token transaction on April 30th. On-chain data shows that Buterin exchanged 26,654 XDB tokens (worth approximately $3.86) for approximately 0.00197 ETH (worth approximately $4.56). The bot used approximately $1.14 million worth of WETH to manipulate the XDB price between SushiSwap and Uniswap V2, buying and selling before and after Buterin's transaction. After deducting approximately $5.14 in gas fees, the bot actually lost money in this attack, while Buterin's slippage loss was only a few cents.

This incident demonstrates that MEV bots have become highly industrialized, indiscriminately scanning all pending transactions in public mempools for opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities. Buterin has been pushing for encrypted mempools to be a priority in the Ethereum roadmap for 2026 to address the toxic MEV problem. Jaredfromsubway.eth, which rose to prominence during the 2023 Memecoin boom and once accounted for 7% of Ethereum network gas fees, has extracted over $7 million in profits from hundreds of thousands of transactions. This bot has repeatedly bypassed defenses such as protocol upgrades and mempool filtering.