Following a strategy known as sandwich attacks, an anonymous trader connected to a digital wallet with the name "jaredfromsubway.eth" has become the talk of the decentralized finance world in recent days.
The name of the disgraced former spokesperson for the US restaurant chain appears in the wallet of the so-called trading bot operator. A trader places an order on a DeFi app for a token in the sandwich maneuver. On the exchange, a bot can acquire that token before the order is carried out. On that exchange, the token's price rises as a result. The bot sells the token for a profit as the price rises.
At a time when yields across DeFi have remained unattractive, the bot was able to make approximately $1.67 million in two days, according to data from tracker EigenPhi. The company estimated that the gains brought the total profits made by traders or other organizations employing the strategy to nearly $4 million over the past month.
In DeFi, sandwich attacks are not a novel idea. Typically, the perpetrators use trading bots and algorithms to locate potential victims by examining a collection of pending transactions on DeFi exchanges that are hosted on Ethereum-based blockchains. The bots are customized to track down productive exchanges. Typically, transactions involving tokens with low liquidity or large transaction sizes are the most appealing targets. In the most recent instance, traders favored memecoins like PEPE and APED, tokens that are thought to have little real use or value and are similar to more well-known ones like Dogecoin.