Orkid Labs
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Published on Fri Oct 31 2025 19:00:00 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Orkid Labs

The MEV arms race has real costs. Flashbots reports that sandwich attacks extract 500 million to 1 billion dollars annually from retail users who don’t know they’re being attacked. The average MetaMask user pays 87 basis points per swap—8.70 dollars per thousand-dollar transaction—to invisible bots that buy before them and sell after them. We observe that some protocols subsidize execution to compete with centralized exchanges, which compresses margins. Trading desks report getting frontrun on their own arbitrage opportunities, burning gas on reverts and seeing inconsistent profit-and-loss per unit of risk.

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Written by Orkid Labs

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