Solana MEV bot bags $1.7M, CFTC eyes DeFi risk mitigation: Finance Redefined

Web3 applications and protocols saw 124% growth in 2023, where an average of 4.2 million UAWs interacted with these apps daily, more than double the number of users in 2022.

Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.

One Solana-based maximum extractable value (MEV) bot made headlines this past week as it raked in $1.7 million in profit from a single trade. Meanwhile, the Near Foundation laid off 40% of its staff despite a solid financial performance, and the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) seeks to mitigate DeFi risks with the ecosystem’s stakeholders — all of this and more in our weekly DeFi newsletter.

The top 100 DeFi tokens had a bullish week, which was led by the approval of the first Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States. The total value locked in DeFi protocols also breached $65 billion.

MEV bot pulls $1.7 million profit from a single “inefficient” Dogwifhat trade

A Solana-based MEV bot managed to rake in a staggering $1.7 million from a single questionable trade when a trader made a $9 million purchase of memecoin Dogwifhat (WIF) “in the most inefficient way possible.”

The MEV bot, run by 2fast, swapped 703 Solana (SOL) for 490,000 WIF and then swapped that same amount of WIF into 19,035 SOL within the same transaction bundle, netting itself a profit of $1.73 million, according to Solscan data.