A MEV arbitrage bot, managed by 2Fast, made a staggering $1.8 million profit from a single transaction on the Solana network, converting 703 SOL worth $70,000 into 19,035 SOL valued at $1.9 million in just 20 seconds. A portion of the profit, 890 SOL, was tipped to Figment, a network validator.
The bot’s profit was obtained through a MEV strategy targeting trades of the memecoin project dogwifhat (WIF) on January 10. The strategy enabled 2Fast to secure significant gains.
MEV was captured via Jito Labs’ execution tool, which allows users to find MEV and bid for transaction bundles on Solana, similar to Ethereum’s Flashbots.
An investor, due to carelessness, suffered a severe loss by mistakenly placing an order in a low-liquidity pool, spending close to $9 million to acquire WIF at a rate of $3 per coin, far above the market rate of $0.2 at the time.
This created a back-running opportunity for MEV bots, which monitor the mempool for unconfirmed transactions and prepare their own transactions to follow the targeted ones. 2Fast alone earned nearly $1.8 million, but other bots also took a share according to blockchain data.