MEV bot gets $1M but also loses after an hour

• An Ethereum arbitrage trading bot handled to strike the jackpot.
• Also, the bot lost it all on that very day in an mocking turn of happenings in decentralized finance (DeFi).

Robert Miller, a worker at the research company Flashbots posted on Twitter about how a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot with the prefix 0xbadc0de was able to get 800 Ether (ETH), valued at about $1 million, by arbitrage trade.

In line with Miller, the bot wwas benefited with a huge arbitrage chance that came when a trader tried to sell $1.8 million in cUSDC by the decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap v2 and only received assets valued at $500 in return. The bot recognized this opportunity and quickly bounced to action and received enormous profits.

Although, only after an hour, a hacker took the advantage of a vulnerability in 0xbadc0de’s “bad code” and deceived it into permitting a transaction that cleared out its balance of 1,101 ETH, which was approximately $1.41 million at the press time.

If we go through the blockchain security company PeckShield, the error can be tracked to the bot’s callback routine, and this was utilized by the attacker to sanction an arbitrary address for spending.

On September 18, a vulnerability in Profanity, an Ethereum vanity address producer, was utilized, taking almost $3.3 million in funds from different wallets. Investigations done by the decentralized exchange collector 1inch noted that there was uncertainty in terms of making of the wallets. The DEX alerted clients that their wallet are in the danger zone and requested them to transfer their assets.

After more than one week, one more vanity wallet address was utilized and sucked ETH of value approximating at $1 millon. After draining the money, the attackers quickly sent them to the controversial crypto mixer Tornado Cash.

Steve Anderrson

Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.