Tether has blacklisted an address that exploited a bug in Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bots and drained $25 million last week. The address outsmarted the MEV bots trying to execute a sandwich trade by back-running the transaction. The USDT address held about $3 million in USDT and $21 million in various other ERC-20 tokens at the time of blacklisting. The blacklisting has attracted pushback from the community for its censorship approach. MEV bots make money by taking advantage of information about transactions that are about to be executed, which is often considered a form of invisible tax. The aim of the MEV blocker is to minimize the amount of value extracted from traders.

(By PRASHANT JHA)