Just as the Ethereum ETF resolution is approaching and market expectations are pessimistic, a big news happened yesterday (but it seems that there is not much discussion) and it has brought more sway to the possibility of ETF passing. The US Department of Justice arrested two college students from prestigious universities and accused them of making 25 million US dollars through Ethereum MEV, and the means were the common sandwich robot. In the indictment, this behavior was directly defined as "telecommunication fraud" and "money laundering" and was bluntly stated that this behavior was "Ethereum transactions were manipulated" and "attacked the integrity of the financial system." If the US government previously believed that Crypto was a manipulated market mainly referring to the currency price, this time the manipulation was directly elevated to transactions.

In addition, the accusation of the two college students by the Department of Justice this time has also hit the node operators, mining pools and other roles with a high degree of MEV discourse power.

If at first glance this news is bad for Ethereum, there are two intriguing details:

1. There is a sentence in the indictment that "as the cryptocurrency market continues to develop, the department will continue to root out fraud, support victims, and restore confidence in these markets." The statement of the Department of Justice belongs to the characterization of the position on Ethereum and Crypto. Cryptocurrency is developing rapidly, but there are many problems, but don't worry, we will work hard to solve them and restore everyone's confidence.

2. What is more interesting is that just last week before the release of this MEV accusation, Consensys (Metamask's parent company), which had sued the SEC with US regulators, launched Smart Transactions to specifically solve the MEV problem. The coincidence in the timeline may be a kind of "tacit understanding" reached by both parties?