Vitalik Buterin Gets Sandwiched by the Same Bot He’s Trying to Shut Down

Ethereum's MEV problem just got a face attached to it, and that face belongs to the network's own co-founder.

Written by: Sophia Cruz • Monday, June 22, 2026 • 2 min read

• Last updated: Monday, June 22, 2026

Quick overview

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was affected by a MEV attack involving the jaredfromsubway.eth bot, which manipulated pricing around his transaction.
The bot executed a $1.14 million operation to extract value from Buterin's trade, despite Buterin advocating for solutions to prevent such attacks.
Interestingly, the jaredfromsubway.eth wallet has been drained, and some trades resulted in losses after accounting for gas costs.
While this incident highlights ongoing concerns about Ethereum's structure, it has not significantly impacted ETH's price, which remains stable.

Ethereum’s MEV problem just got a face attached to it, and that face belongs to the network’s own co-founder. Blockchain records show that a transaction Vitalik Buterin made on April 30, a swap involving 26,544 XDB tokens, was sandwiched by the notorious jaredfromsubway.eth bot, one of the most active and widely criticized MEV operations on the network.

The bot deployed $1.14 million in WETH across SushiSwap and Uniswap V2 to manipulate pricing around Buterin’s trade and extract value from it. The irony was not lost on the Ethereum community. Buterin has spent a meaningful part of the past year publicly pushing for protocol-level fixes to exactly this kind of attack, and he ended up on the receiving end of it himself.

There is a strange postscript to the story. Reports indicate the jaredfromsubway.eth wallet has since been drained, and that on at least some of its trades, the bot actually lost money after accounting for gas costs. The strategy is fully automated and does not appear to run a profitability check before executing, meaning it sometimes fires off attacks that cost more to execute than they earn.

Developers have been pushing for encrypted mempools and similar protections for a long time, mostly as a research-stage conversation. Having Ethereum’s own co-founder caught by the exact attack he is trying to eliminate makes that conversation harder to keep on the back burner.

Price action has not really reacted. ETH stayed inside its usual $1,730 to $1,750 band, moving very little for stretches of the session, which is often how a market behaves right before it commits to a direction. The nearest support is around $1,710, with $1,690 and $1,670 below that if selling picks up. Resistance is layered above at $1,760, $1,770, and $1,800.

By itself, this is not the kind of news that swings ETH’s price in either direction. But it lands on top of a pile of structural questions investors already have about how Ethereum is built, and another headline like this one does not help close that gap.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR See More

Sophia Cruz

Financial Writer - Asian & European Desks

Sophia is an experienced writer, reporter and newsdesk member, mostly on the financial sectors. For the past 5 years Sophia has covered a wide variety of topics such as the financial markets, economics, technology, fin-tech and trading. Sophia has been a part of the FX Leaders team since 2017 and works on producing valuable content and information for traders of all levels of experience.