An anonymous trader linked to a digital wallet labeled “jaredfromsubway.eth” has become the talk of the decentralized finance world the last few days after racking up both big fees and profits through a strategy known as sandwich attacks.
(Bloomberg) — An anonymous trader linked to a digital wallet labeled “jaredfromsubway.eth” has become the talk of the decentralized finance world the last few days after racking up both big fees and profits through a strategy known as sandwich attacks.
The wallet for the so-called trading bot operator is a play on name of the disgraced former spokesman for the US restaurant chain. In the sandwich maneuver, a trader places on order for a token on a DeFi app. Before the order is executed, a bot can snap up that token on the exchange. That drives up the price of the token on that exchange. After the price has risen, the bot sells the token for a profit.
According to data from tracker EigenPhi, the bot was able to make about $1.67 million in two days at a time when yields across DeFi have remained unattractive. The gains sent the total profits made by traders or entities using the strategy to nearly $4 million in the past month, the firm estimated.
Sandwich attacks aren’t a new concept in DeFi. The aggressors, using trading bots and algorithms, usually find potential victims by looking at a collection of pending transactions on DeFi exchanges running on blockchains like Ethereum. The bots are programmed to sniff out profitable transactions. The most attractive target usually are transactions involving tokens with low liquidity or large transaction size. In the latest case, the traders favored memecoins like PEPE and APED, which are tokens similar to the better-known one such as Dogecoin that are considered to have little real usage or value.
But executing the strategy is usually costly. The trader or traders behind jaredfromsubway.eth have spent about $1.3 million in transaction expenses, or gas fees, on the Ethereum in the past 24 hours, according to data from Etherscan. That’s 1.8% of the total gas fees spent on the network in the same time period.
A pseudonymous crypto researcher that uses the name “sealaunch.xyz” noted that jaredfromsubway.eth has spent more than $7 million in transactions fees to execute more than 180,000 transactions in the past two months to potentially profit from front-running other users.
DeFi – whether it’s peer-to-peer exchanges or decentralized lending platforms – allows traders to interact with each other directly without any intermediary. While proponents advocate the benefits of the trustless nature, traders could take advantage by executing controversial, though allowed, strategies like sandwich attacks.
–With assistance from Olga Kharif.
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