A crypto dealer fell sufferer to a sandwich assault whereas making a $220,764 stablecoin switch on March 12 — dropping virtually 98% of its worth to a Most Extractable Worth (MEV) bot.
$220,764 value of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin was swapped to $5,271 of Tether (USDT) in eight seconds because the MEV bot efficiently front-ran the transaction, banking over $215,500.
Knowledge from Ethereum block explorer reveals the MEV assault occurred on decentralized change Uniswap v3’s USDC-USDT liquidity pool, the place $19.8 million value of worth is locked.
Particulars of the sandwich assault transaction. Supply: Etherscan
The MEV bot front-ran the transaction by swapping all of the USDC liquidity out of the Uniswap v3 USDC-USDT pool after which put it again in after the transaction was executed, in accordance with founding father of The DeFi Report Michael Nadeau.
The attacker tipped Ethereum block builder “bob-the-builder.eth” $200,000 from the $220,764 swap and profited $8,000 themselves, Nadeau mentioned.
DeFi researcher “DeFiac” speculates the identical dealer utilizing completely different wallets has fallen sufferer to a complete of six sandwich assaults, citing “inside instruments.” They identified that each one funds traveled from borrowing and lending protocol Aave earlier than being deposited on Uniswap.
Two of the wallets fell sufferer to an MEV bot sandwich assault on March 12 at round 9:00 am UTC. Ethereum pockets addresses “0xDDe…42a6D” and “0x999…1D215” have been sandwich attacked for $138,838 and $128,003 in transactions that occurred three to 4 minutes earlier.
Each transactors made the identical swap within the Uniswap v3 liquidity pool because the dealer who made the $220,762 switch.
Others speculate the trades might be makes an attempt at cash laundering.
“When you’ve got NK illicit funds you could possibly assemble a really mev-able tx, then privately ship it to a mev bot and have them arb it in a bundle,” mentioned founding father of crypto knowledge dashboard DefiLlama, 0xngmi.
“That approach you wash all the cash with near 0 losses.”
Associated: THORChain at crossroads: Decentralization clashes with illicit exercise
Whereas initially criticizing Uniswap, Nadeau later acknowledged that the transactions didn’t come from Uniswap’s entrance finish, which has MEV safety and default slippage settings.
Nadeau backtracked on these criticisms after Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams and others clarified the protections Uniswap has in place to battle towards sandwich assaults.
Supply: Hayden Adams
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