Anti-Aircraft Gun Shooting at Mosquito, Robot Exploits Million-Dollar Vulnerability to Swindle Vitalik for a Few Cents

BlockBeats News, May 8th, The robot "JaredfromSubway" recently succeeded in carrying out a minor MEV attack on Vitalik's token swap. Vitalik intended to exchange approximately 26,544 XDB tokens worth $3.86 for about $4.56 worth of ETH. However, the robot used around $1.14 million worth of WETH to conduct large trades between the SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 liquidity pools, manipulating the XDB price and causing Vitalik's transaction slippage to worsen. The entire MEV attack involved around $1 million in trading volume, resulting in only a few cents of loss for Vitalik, with the robot experiencing a slight loss after deducting a $5.14 Gas fee.

Ironically, Vitalik has long been publicly against "toxic MEV" and has vigorously promoted the encrypted mempool as a solution in the Ethereum roadmap for 2026. MEV has extracted over $1.2 billion in user value, with sandwich attacks accounting for 51%, essentially levying an invisible tax on regular users through the public mempool. The robot mentioned above, JaredfromSubway, has been famous for sandwich trading since 2023, once occupying 7% of the Ethereum chain's Gas fees, accumulating profits exceeding $7 million. This time, not even Vitalik was spared.