Maximal extractable value (MEV) refers back to the financial worth diverted from customers by block builders by means of the manipulation of transaction ordering. Essentially the most dangerous kind of MEV are sandwich attacks, the place an attacker concurrently frontruns and backruns a sufferer’s swaps. This provides the sufferer a suboptimal execution value whereas the attacker pockets a selection. Most MEV exercise happens on Ethereum as a result of it has excessive exercise on DEXs and options an open block-building market that exposes order circulate to searchers.
On this article, Cointelegraph Analysis offers insights into sandwiching exercise from November 2024 to October 2025, primarily based on a data set of greater than 95,000 sandwich attacks exclusively provided by the data platform EigenPhi.
Our analysis signifies that, regardless of the slowdown in sandwich extraction, the danger to strange customers persists. Whereas attacks lead to about $60 million in annual losses for merchants, block builders seize most of this worth by means of gasoline charges. Attackers find yourself with a revenue margin of merely 5%. Nearly 40% of all sandwiches hit low-volatility swimming pools, which signifies that merchants can expertise extreme slippage even on swaps that are sometimes thought-about secure. However, the decline in extraction may recommend that extra merchants are actually utilizing MEV-protection instruments.
Nonetheless, the difficulty is way from resolved as a result of there is no such thing as a unified mechanism to guard person swaps from sandwiching. There’s a rising debate about introducing native MEV safety on the Ethereum protocol stage. In our latest articles, we examined technical improvements geared toward this, particularly Shutter’s threshold encryption and Batched Threshold Encryption.
State of sandwiching on Ethereum in 2025
Sandwich extraction fell sharply in 2025, whilst month-to-month DEX volumes rose from round $65 billion in Q1 to effectively over $100 billion by Q3. Month-to-month extraction from sandwich attacks dropped from practically $10 million in late 2024 to about $2.5 million by October 2025.
The web earnings after gasoline prices from the sandwich exercise averaged about $260,000 per thirty days in 2025. This quantity, nevertheless, was inflated by a single outlier in January 2025, when one sandwich attack generated greater than $800,000 in revenue.
However, the variety of attacks has remained excessive, constantly ranging between 60,000 and 90,000 per thirty days all through the interval. Roughly 70% of all sandwich attacks are related to a single entity generally known as Jared (jaredfromsubway.eth), one of the crucial well-known MEV searchers. Jared’s v2 bot not too long ago began utilizing a classy technique that is able to focusing on as much as 4 victims without delay. The bot generally locations a middle transaction between the front-run and back-run to push swap charges even additional for the next victims. Jared may manipulate value by including or eradicating liquidity from the pool.
Which buying and selling pairs do sandwich attackers goal?
Data exhibits that about 38% of attacks focused low-volatility swimming pools that embrace stablecoins, wrappers and LSTs (liquid staking tokens) of Ether and Bitcoin. Notably, round 12% of all sandwiches hit steady swaps, which creates slippage threat in locations the place it’s principally sudden and particularly damaging. Essentially the most actively traded token exterior stablecoins and wrapped property was the memecoin MANYU paired with WETH. Jared has repeatedly focused this pool since July and extracted practically $19,000 throughout 65 sandwich attacks.
As profitability compresses, amount is now a key for MEV bots
Sandwich bots are a extremely aggressive area of interest, and fewer of them have remained energetic as earnings have declined. In October 2025, a complete of 515 distinct bots operated on Ethereum. Nonetheless, solely simply over 100 distinct sandwich bots execute trades in a typical month.
The typical revenue per sandwich assault stays extraordinarily low at simply above $3. Solely six attackers generated greater than $10,000 in complete revenue, which exhibits how slender the trail to constant returns has develop into on this area of interest. About one-third of all energetic sandwich bots in 2025 operated round breakeven ( -$10 to $10 ), whereas roughly 30% recorded web losses. Bots can typically incur losses as a consequence of excessive competitors for a restricted set of alternatives, miscalculated slippage and gasoline prices. Margins that are too skinny to soak up these errors.
The data point out that Jared’s technique has been probably the most worthwhile up to now. It prioritizes amount and captures many of the out there sandwich alternatives, together with smaller ones, which frequently lead to earnings of just a few cents. All through most of 2025, gas costs stayed low relative to per-attack income, which made this mannequin much more viable than it had been earlier than. But Jared nonetheless incurs losses at occasions. In April 2025, its revenue margin was minus 20%, which translated right into a lack of about $12,000.
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