The Jungle Never Sleeps—2025 Reality Check in the Speed-Wars Era

Why leveraged sandwiches still print six-figure days, LPs and retail swaps remain prey, and Ethereum’s ordering rights now live in private builder markets.

May 15, 2025

As we reach the climax of The Rise of the Sandwich Species, let’s retrace the evolutionary trail we’ve mapped so far—each stop revealing how Ethereum’s mempool morphed from an open river to a hyper-optimized hunting ground:

Prehistoric Age – Gas-Auction Knife Fights: open mempools, 2,900 rebids, and the first Bancor sandwich proved that paying more gas could trap any trade.
Assembly-Line Era – Bundle-Boosted Beasts: Flashbots’ private tunnels ended spam but industrialized MEV, handing ordering power to builders and relays.
Predator Proliferation (A) – Flash-Loan Mega-Fauna: cross-protocol flash-loan sandwiches juggled nine-figure balances in a single block, turning liquidity itself into a weapon.
Predator Proliferation (B) – Mirage, Assembly Lines & Camouflage: LP-targeting mirage makers, Jared’s conveyor-belt sandwiches, and tax-token tricksters showed that stealth, scale, and smart-contract bait all have their own ecological niches.

Now, in the finale—2025 Reality Check: The Jungle Never Sleeps—we’ll watch those old tricks return with Formula-1 speed, see tiny retail swaps sliced alongside whales, and ask the hardest question yet: who truly controls blockspace when predators, builders, and validators all race for the same slot?

By early 2025, the biodiversity boom had peaked—but the jungle was far from quiet. On March 12, a sandwich bot chained together six leveraged attacks in just five minutes, draining $714,000 with textbook precision. The patterns? Pure vintage 2022—single-target sandwiches, Aave-funded leverage, back-to-back Uniswap pool snipes. But the execution? Formula-1 fast. Same tricks, new reflexes.

It was a reality check for the ecosystem: evolution doesn’t just invent—it optimizes. Even as the MEV scene grows more complex, old playbooks still pay out, because most users still walk into traps unprotected. And as long as that remains true, sandwiching won’t fade—it will industrialize.

Which brings us to the real takeaway.

Five Counter‑Intuitive Truths

Old Tricks Still Print Money Despite four years of anti-sandwich tools, private RPCs, and wallet warnings, unprotected trades still flood the mempool. Classic sandwiches, bundled and polished, continue to harvest six-figure days. Bundle protection didn’t kill them—it industrialized them.
Victims Aren’t Just Whale Swaps Data show that LPs adding liquidity—or even tiny swap users—get sniped routinely. The myth that only jumbo swaps get bitten is flat‑out wrong.
Capital Barriers Have Evaporated Massive treasuries are no longer required. Flashloans, lending markets, and expendable meme inventories grant instant firepower. Attackers strike wherever liquidity pools form, not just on select blue-chip pairs.
Sandwiching Is Now an Industry, Not a Hobby Margins should have collapsed as builder fees rose and gas optimization became brutally competitive. Instead, factory-grade bots like Jared dominate through transaction reuse, bundle sharing, and hyper-targeted optimizations. Sophistication—not brute gas money—now wins the day.
Ordering Power Has Left the Building In Ethereum’s early years, miners decided transaction order based on gas—a crude but protocol-native mechanism. Today, that power has migrated outside the protocol. With bundles and PBS, block ordering is now outsourced to specialized builders who operate in off-chain markets, using private bids and opaque routing. The result? A more efficient marketplace—but one that concentrates power, reduces transparency, and threatens Ethereum’s neutrality at its core.

Bottom line—Where We Really Stand

Bundle protection didn’t eliminate sandwich attacks. It reshaped the ecosystem—accelerating the diversification, professionalization, and industrial scaling of MEV extraction. The unintended consequence? A broader, faster, and more specialized predator class.

But the real problem isn’t just how sandwich bots exploit the ordering mechanism to attack users—it’s the externalization of Ethereum’s core mechanism: who gets to decide transaction order. When that power moved to builders, it left the domain of public protocol and entered a world of private coordination—opening the door to centralization, censorship, and value capture by the few.

As we build defenses—wallet warnings, slippage protections, encrypted mempools—the predators adapt. This is not a static arms race. It’s a dynamic feedback loop between market structure and attacker behavior.

To break the cycle, we must go deeper:

Rethink the economics of blockspace inclusion,
Redesign validator-builder incentives,
Reassert ordering logic as a protocol-native right.

Until then, the river stays crystal clear, the piranhas stay hungry, and the next generation of sandwich predators is already learning to fly.

The atomicity of bundles and the offloading of ordering power haven’t just changed how Ethereum trades are sequenced—they’ve quietly reshaped what Ethereum’s consensus even means. It’s time the community confronts this head-on.

Read the first four posts of this Sandwich history series.