A MEV bot on Solana made a profit of 30 million USD in just 2 months
According to MRGN Research founder Ben Coverston, the infamous trading bot called “arsc” made about $30 million in transactions on Solana in just two months thanks to the MEV trick, or sandwich attack. .
One of the main asset storage wallets of the “arsc" bot is “9973h…zyWp6”, containing nearly 19 million USD in assets. Ben Coverston said: “This wallet is very inactive and judging by the way it operates, it can be confirmed I'm sure this is a cold wallet."
Specifically, wallet “9973h…zyWp6” contains 18.87 million USD in assets including 114,352 SOL (about 16.8 million USD) and 1.1 million USD USDC. The remainder is the small amount of wrapped-SOL (wSOL), Cringe Coin (CRINGE) and Kabosu (KAB) tokens that the wallet holds.
Another wallet with the address "Ai4zq…VXKKT" is gradually converting SOL to USDC through DEX Jupiter and holding positions in Kamino.
The total assets of this wallet amount to nearly 9.7 million USD, which is mainly non-SOL tokens and many other LSTs.
Finally, the "BCbrp...vi58q" wallet of bot "arsc" is a form of Token Account on Solana. Token Account on Solana is often used to hold a specific type of token. This wallet is similar to a regular wallet but is specially designed. especially just to hold tokens.
This is believed to be the main “SOL repository” of the “arsc” bot, currently containing 5,587 SOLs (about 824 thousand USD) used to provide SOLs for sandwich attacks through various signers and tippers on Jito .
Three wallets believed to belong to the arsc bot currently hold a total of 29.8 million USD in assets. Coverston believes that the arsc bot operator is trying to keep his information private. He affirmed:
“They do not seem to want to attract attention, as they have taken steps to conceal their activities and profits.”
Taking advantage of slippage - the difference between the expected price and the price when the actual order is executed, MEV bots will insert two transactions sandwiched between the investor's transaction, thereby giving birth to the concept of sandwich attack. . Transaction 1 will sell right before the investor's order, then transaction 2 will immediately buy at a lower price, thereby making a profit from such small differences.
MEV is still a serious problem on Solana, statistics show that users on this Layer-1 have paid millions of dollars in additional fees just to prevent bots from attacking transactions. In March 2024, Jito Labs also had to stop the mempool feature because of front-running problems on Solana. Most recently, the MEV spam bot caused 75% of transactions on Solana to fail in April 2024.
Solana is now stepping up stricter measures to eliminate this problem. Recently, the Solana Foundation announced sanctions against a group of validators for participating in sandwich attacks against users in the ecosystem. Additionally, the Solana 1.18 update is currently being rolled out to effectively tackle spam bots.
