Managed by a certain jaredfromsubway MEV bot spent $1.33 million in commissions on the Ethereum network over the past 24 hours to carry out “sandwich attacks” while interacting with low-liquid mem-tokens Pepe, Wojak and Chad on DEX like Uniswap.
The address accounted for 1.75% of all gas spent on the network. It ranked second among the largest consumers of the ether network’s resources by this metric.
According to Watchers.ETH, the bot had a profit of ~$700,000 on April 19.
One of the mentioned assets – Pepe (PEPE) – was launched on April 14. In recent days, the meme-token has risen in price by more than 7 times.
Despite the high momentum and jump in price, traders are unable to cash in their assets. According to ImmuneFi CTO Adrian Hetman, the problem with meme tokens “is not only the lack of buyers, but also the fact that their liquidity is usually concentrated in AMM pools,” which prevents large transactions.
For this reason, transactions in such assets lead to serious slippages, making them ideal targets for “sandwich attacks” by MEV bots.
A typical algorithm looks like this: the bot finds a large buy order in the mempool, puts its order in front of it to buy tokens at a lower price using frontrunning. The large order is executed, moving the price up. Then, using backrunning, the coins are sold at a profit before the other users.
According to EigenPhi, PEPE and WOJAK have become the most popular assets on the Ethereum network in the past week after WETH, USDC and USDT with transaction volume of over $250 million and $120 million respectively.
The bot managed by jaredfromsubway.eth made ~$1.5 million profit in pairs with PEPE, with WOJAK – ~$2.81 million.
The activity of the MEV-bot and the haip around mem-tokens led to an increase in the cost of gas. While on April 15 the average was 25 gwei (~$1.10), on April 19 it was already 72 gwei (~$2.92) and the maximum was 240 gwei (~$9.74).
