Comprehensive Analysis of MEV Sandwich Attacks: From Transaction Ordering to Flash Swaps — The…

On Wednesday, March 12, the crypto community was shaken by a major MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) attack, in which a trader lost $215,000 in a single incident.

In simple terms, this trader intended to swap $220,800 worth of USDC for an equivalent amount of USDT in the Uniswap v3 trading pool. However, instead of receiving the expected amount, they ended up with only 5,272 USDT. In just a few seconds, $215,700 was wiped out — see the image below.

The image above is a screenshot of the blockchain record for this transaction. The root cause of this catastrophe was a notorious exploit in the blockchain world known as a “Sandwich Attack.”

The first to disclose this MEV attack was a user named Michael (see the image above). He explained:

“An MEV bot front-ran the transaction by swapping all the USDC liquidity out. After the transaction is executed, they put…