A crypto trader fell victim to a sandwich attack while making a $220,764 stablecoin transfer on March 12

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.

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.

The trader, who had borrowed $216,000 from Aave and converted it to USD Coin USDCUSD, attempted to swap it for Tether USDTUSD on decentralized exchange Uniswap v3, according to data from Ethereum block explorer.

The transaction was stalled for 10 minutes before being bundled by a miner and included in a block at around 9:08 am UTC.

The MEV bot then front-ran the transaction by swapping all the USDC liquidity out of the Uniswap v3 USDC-USDT pool and then put it back in after the transaction was executed.

The transaction was tipped $200,000 by Ethereum block builder “bob-the-builder.eth” from the $220,764 swap and the attacker profited $8,000, founder of The DeFi Report Michael Nadeau said.

Image Credit: The DeFi Report

DeFi researcher "DeFiac" speculates the same trader using different wallets has fallen victim to a total of six sandwich attacks, citing "internal tools." They pointed out that all funds traveled from borrowing and lending protocol Aave before being deposited on Uniswap.

Two of the wallets fell victim to an MEV bot sandwich attack at around 9:00 am UTC on March 12. Ethereum wallet addresses "0xDDe...42a6D" and "0x999...1D215" were sandwich attacked for $138,838 and $128,003 in transactions that occurred three to four minutes earlier.

Both transactors made the same swap in the Uniswap v3 liquidity pool.

Image Credit: DeFiac

Others speculate the trades could 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 founder of crypto data dashboard DefiLlama, 0xngmi.

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

While initially criticizing Uniswap, Nadeau later acknowledged that the transactions didn't come from Uniswap's front end, which has MEV protection and default slippage settings.

Nadeau backtracked on those criticisms after Unispaw CEO Hayden Adams and others clarified the protections Uniswap has in place to fight against sandwich attacks.