An ETH ICO Participant Whose Meat Became The Center Piece of A Whalemeat Sandwich
On August 14, many news posts reported that a massive Ethereum whale that played a part in the project ICO transferred 145,000 $ETH, worth $276M. Maybe this whale is lucky enough to escape from the MEV searchers. But another ETH ICO participant had sadly become the prey under the claws of sandwich front running attackers.
We discover the story from EigenPhi’s Sandwich daily report.
Two Sandwich Attack Victims, One Trading Strategy
In our Aug 14’s Sandwich daily report, two Sandwich attacks launched by the same MEV 🤖 in 5 mins became the top two most profitable ones of the day.
The attacking contract, the time, the trading volume, and the tokens involved displayed the same pattern.
Let’s check out the recipes for the sandwiches.
Here is Sandwich 0xb42’s victim transaction detail:
And here is the victim transaction detail of Sandwich 0x4b0.
Same swapping amount, same token pairs, same Balancer Vault, and same Uniswap V3 liquidity pool.
To find out more, let’s move on to Etherscan.
Checking on Etherscan, we can see these two EOA addresses are pretty new, only having two very familiar transactions for each.
These logs did provide a new clue for our exploration: the from address of the first transfers are the same one: 0x6C5a848B0d547Ff7bB71bd86c1a649C26BEe6065.
Suspicious "Contractor"
Who is 0x6c5a? When examining the transaction history of the address, we discovered a fantastic fact about this guy: the account has repeatedly transferred 450.05 or 460.05 $ETH to 10 EOAs.
Additionally, the account swapped 230 $ETH for $USDT in the same way as victim 1 and victim 2 in the latest transaction.
Its Zapper history displays the process with more clarity.
Initially, we suspected this account would be the central trader who wanted to practice a risk strategy. However, we noticed it had been funded by the address 0xc736, who transferred over 5K $ETH, worth $9.5M, to 0x6c5a. Before the three transfers from 0xc736, there was no other trading activity in the 0x6c5a account.
As curious as you are, we looked up this 0xc736 on Nansen.ai and found this:
Mystery solved. It turns out that 0x6c5a was a "contractor" responsible for distributing 450.05 or 460.05 $ETH to different EOAs to swap for $USDT.
New Victim Emerged
After tracking the transactions of all the $ETH receivers, we found that 6 out of 10 EOAs have already swapped 230 $WETH for $USDT, all using 1inch to get the job done. And there is a new victim who suffered a Sandwich attack on Aug 15. The victim, whose EOA is 0xa517d87e5079b145a8befe7dbad47621f5f793fd, lost $6,950.9 in total when swapping 230 $WETH for $USDT.
Tip of the Iceberg?
It’s worth noting that these ETH ICO players started to do something around the same time. There might be other traders like them we haven’t discovered yet. If you see something, please say something to let the community know.
To sum up, the whole procedure is shown in the figure below.
The ETH ICO investor 0xc736 sent 5K $ETH to 0x6c5a, who helped distribute the $ETH to the other 10 EOA accounts.
Then those accounts started to swap 230 $ETH for $USDT through 1inch V3 routers.
Six accounts have already swapped as press time, while three were squeezed by Sandwich attackers and lost over $22,996.5 in total.
Think A Whale Is Too Big To Fit Into A Sandwich? Indirectly, it could.
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