A certain MEV robot makes a whopping 17 million profit from a suspicious trade

MEV Robot Makes $1.73 Million in Single Trade
According to Cointelegraph, an MEV robot based on Solana successfully earned around $1.7 million from a problematic trade, where a trader bought $9 million worth of the meme coin Dogwifhat (WIF) at a significant slippage.
MEV robots are automated programs used to scan the blockchain network, identify profitable trading opportunities, and automatically execute these orders. Data from Solscan shows that the MEV robot operated by 2fast exchanged 703 SOL tokens for 490,000 WIF tokens, and then swapped the same amount of WIF for 19,035 SOL in the same transaction bundle, netting $1.73 million.
The MEV robot utilized a tool developed by Jito Labs, the development arm of Solana’s liquidity staking protocol Jito, which operates similarly to the MEV infrastructure project Flashbots on the Ethereum network, allowing robots to search for maximum extractable value and bid into transaction bundles.
How did the arbitrage trade happen?
The sudden arbitrage opportunity arose after a trader named “zeroxtrading.sol” executed a trade buying meme coins worth $8.9 million. Due to the large trade occurring in a low liquidity pool, the order was executed at a price of around $3 per WIF token, approximately 1400% higher than the token’s value at the time. Following the completion of the trade, the WIF price immediately plummeted, causing the trader to lose 92% of their funds instantly.
On Thursday (the 11th), an anonymous developer Pland stated on X platform that the MEV robot used a relatively simple “backrunning” strategy to arbitrage from the trader who executed the WIF order in the “least efficient manner.”
Backrunning is considered less harmful to the blockchain network as it only captures arbitrage opportunities generated by large erroneous pricing trades without affecting the original trade. In contrast, more malicious “sandwich attacks” involve inserting an order between two trades, leading to the repricing of the initial bid, which usually impacts the original trade price and causes losses for blockchain users.