A crypto dealer fell sufferer to a sandwich assault whereas making a $220,764 stablecoin switch on March 12 — dropping nearly 98% of its worth to a Maximum Extractable Value (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.

Data from Ethereum block explorer reveals the MEV assault occurred on decentralized exchange Uniswap v3’s USDC-USDT liquidity pool, the place $19.8 million worth of worth is locked.

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, according to 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 totally different wallets has fallen sufferer to a complete of six sandwich assaults, citing “internal tools.” They pointed out that every 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” had been sandwich attacked for $138,838 and $128,003 in transactions that occurred three to 4 minutes earlier.

Both transactors made the identical swap within the Uniswap v3 liquidity pool because the dealer who made the $220,762 switch. 

Others speculate the trades may very well be attempts at money laundering.

“If you have NK illicit funds you could construct a very mev-able tx, then privately send it to a mev bot and have them arb it in a bundle,” said founding father of crypto information dashboard DefiLlama, 0xngmi.

“That way you wash all the money with close to 0 losses.”

Related: THORChain at crossroads: Decentralization clashes with illicit activity

While 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 combat towards sandwich assaults.

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