A crypto trader fell victim to a sandwich attack while making a $220,764 stablecoin transfer on March 12 — losing almost 98% of its value to a Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) bot.
$220,764 worth of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin was swapped to $5,271 of Tether (USDT) in eight seconds as the MEV bot successfully front-ran the transaction, banking over $215,500.
Data from Ethereum block explorer shows the MEV attack occurred on decentralized exchange Uniswap v3’s USDC-USDT liquidity pool, where $19.8 million worth of value is locked.
Details of the sandwich attack transaction. Source: Etherscan
The MEV bot front-ran the transaction by swapping all the USDC liquidity out of the Uniswap v3 USDC-USDT pool and then put it back