Maximal extractable worth (MEV) refers back to the financial worth diverted from customers by block builders by the manipulation of transaction ordering. Essentially the most dangerous kind of MEV are sandwich assaults, the place an attacker concurrently frontruns and backruns a sufferer’s swaps. This offers the sufferer a suboptimal execution value whereas the attacker pockets an expansion. 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 gives insights into sandwiching exercise from November 2024 to October 2025, based mostly on a knowledge set of greater than 95,000 sandwich assaults completely supplied by the information platform EigenPhi.Â
Our analysis signifies that, regardless of the slowdown in sandwich extraction, the danger to bizarre customers persists. Whereas assaults lead to about $60 million in annual losses for merchants, block builders seize most of this worth by fuel charges. Attackers find yourself with a revenue margin of merely 5%. Virtually 40% of all sandwiches hit low-volatility swimming pools, which signifies that merchants can expertise extreme slippage even on swaps which are usually thought-about protected. However, the decline in extraction can also counsel that extra merchants are actually utilizing MEV-protection instruments.Â
Nonetheless, the difficulty is way from resolved as a result of there isn’t a unified mechanism to guard consumer swaps from sandwiching. There’s a rising debate about introducing native MEV safety on the Ethereum protocol stage. In our current articles, we examined technical improvements aimed 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 properly over $100 billion by Q3. Month-to-month extraction from sandwich assaults dropped from practically $10 million in late 2024 to about $2.5 million by October 2025.Â
The web income after fuel prices from the sandwich exercise averaged about $260,000 per 30 days in 2025. This quantity, nonetheless, was inflated by a single outlier in January 2025, when one sandwich assault generated greater than $800,000 in revenue.Â
However, the variety of assaults has remained excessive, persistently ranging between 60,000 and 90,000 per 30 days all through the interval. Roughly 70% of all sandwich assaults are related to a single entity generally known as Jared (jaredfromsubway.eth), one of the crucial well-known MEV searchers. Jared’s v2 bot just lately began utilizing a classy technique that’s able to concentrating on as much as 4 victims directly. The bot typically locations a middle transaction between the front-run and back-run to push swap charges even additional for the next victims. Jared may also manipulate value by including or eradicating liquidity from the pool.
Which buying and selling pairs do sandwich attackers goal?Â
Information exhibits that about 38% of assaults focused low-volatility swimming pools that embody stablecoins, wrappers and LSTs (liquid staking tokens) of Ether and Bitcoin. Notably, round 12% of all sandwiches hit secure swaps, which creates slippage danger 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 assaults. Â
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 lively as income 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.Â
The common revenue per sandwich assault stays extraordinarily low at simply above $3. Solely six attackers generated greater than $10,000 in whole revenue, which exhibits how slender the trail to constant returns has change into on this area of interest. About one-third of all lively sandwich bots in 2025 operated round breakeven ( -$10 to $10 ), whereas roughly 30% recorded internet losses. Bots can usually incur losses attributable to excessive competitors for a restricted set of alternatives, miscalculated slippage and fuel prices. Margins which are too skinny to soak up these errors.
The info point out that Jared’s technique has been probably the most worthwhile thus far. It prioritizes amount and captures many of the accessible sandwich alternatives, together with smaller ones, which frequently lead to income of only some cents. All through most of 2025, fuel prices 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 instances. In April 2025, its revenue margin was minus 20%, which translated right into a lack of about $12,000.
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