Exclusive Data From Eigenphi Reveals That Sandwich Attacks On...

Exclusive data shows that MEV attacks hit hundreds of traders on Ethereum each month and continue to result in millions in losses.

Maximal extractable value (MEV) refers to the economic value diverted from users by block builders through the manipulation of transaction ordering. The most harmful type of MEV are sandwich attacks, where an attacker simultaneously frontruns and backruns a victim’s swaps. This gives the victim a suboptimal execution price while the attacker pockets a spread. Most MEV activity occurs on Ethereum because it has high activity on DEXs and features an open block-building market that exposes order flow to searchers.

In this article, Cointelegraph Research provides insights into sandwiching activity from November 2024 to October 2025, based on a data set of more than 95,000 sandwich attacks exclusively provided by the data platform EigenPhi.

Our research indicates that, despite the slowdown in sandwich extraction, the risk to ordinary users persists. While attacks result in about $60 million in annual losses for traders, block builders capture most of this value through gas fees. Attackers end up with a profit margin of merely 5%. Almost 40% of all sandwiches hit low-volatility pools, which indicates that traders can experience severe slippage even on swaps that are typically considered safe. Nevertheless, the decline in extraction may also suggest that more traders are now using MEV-protection tools.

However, the issue is far from resolved because there is no unified mechanism to protect user swaps from sandwiching. There is a growing debate about introducing native MEV protection at the Ethereum protocol level. In our recent articles, we examined technical innovations aimed at this, namely Shutter’s threshold encryption and Batched Threshold Encryption.

Sandwich extraction fell sharply in 2025, even as monthly DEX volumes rose from around $65 billion in Q1 to well over $100 billion by Q3. Monthly extraction from sandwich attacks dropped from nearly $10 million in late 2024 to about $2.5 million by October 2025. The net profits after gas costs from the sandwich activity averaged about $260,000 per month in 2025. This number, however, was inflated by a single outlier in January 2025, when one sandwich attack generated more than $800,000 in profit.

Nevertheless, the number of attacks has remained high, consistently ranging between 60,000 and 90,000 per month throughout the period. Roughly 70% of all sandwich attacks are associat

Source: CoinTelegraph