Vitalik Buterin gets sandwiched by JaredfromSubway as Ethereum MEV risks linger
Buterin has spent the past several months pitching encrypted mempools as a fix for toxic MEV in Ethereums 2026 roadmap. MEV is the profit that whoever orders transactions on a blockchain can pocket by reshuffling them. Anyone running a bot that watches the public mempool, the holding pen where pending transactions sit before being added to a block, can spot opportunities to insert their own trades around someone elses. Sandwich attacks are the most aggressive form, with cumulative MEV extracted on Ethereum is now over $1.2 billion and these type of attacks accounting for roughly 51% of the total volume. Buterin, among other developers, argue that MEV creates a hidden tax on regular users that can favour large, specialized operators over everyone else. Jaredfromsubway.eth rose to prominence in 2023 as it sandwiched traders of meme coins like pepe and wojak during the then meme frenzy. It briefly accounted for 7% of all gas fees on the network in April that year, and has reportedly extracted more than $7 million from victims across hundreds of thousands of transactions since. The bot adapts faster than the protocols trying to stop it. It has survived contract upgrades, mempool filtering, and several attempts by builders to design exploits that drain