How you can lose money in
#crypto on a completely normal looking trade, without getting hacked, without a scam token, without anyone touching your wallet 🧵
1/ You open your wallet, swap $2,000 worth of a token. Price impact looks fine. Slippage is set. You hit confirm.
2/ Before your transaction gets mined, it sits in the "mempool", a public waiting room every pending transaction passes through. It's visible to anyone watching the chain, including bots.
3/ A MEV bot sees your trade sitting there. It submits its own buy order for the same token, with a higher gas fee, so its transaction gets mined in the block right BEFORE yours.
4/ That bot's buy order pushes the price up slightly. Then your trade executes, at the new, worse price the bot just created seconds earlier.
5/ The instant your trade lands, the bot immediately sells what it just bought, pocketing the price difference your own trade caused. Buy → your trade → sell, all packed into the same block. That's the "sandwich."
6/ Nobody hacked you. Nothing was stolen from your wallet. The contract wasn't malicious. You just paid a hidden tax to a bot that read your transaction before it happened, and acted on it faster than you could.
7/ How to actually protect yourself:
→ Lower your slippage tolerance - less room for a bot to extract value from your trade
→ Route through a private/MEV-protected RPC so your transaction skips the public mempool entirely
→ Avoid large trades on thin-liquidity pairs. The thinner the pool, the bigger the price impact, the juicier the sandwich target
→ Split large trades into smaller ones when liquidity is shallow
8/ MEV isn't illegal and it isn't a bug. It's built into how public blockchains work. You can't out-code it. You can only reduce your exposure to it.