Sandwich Attacks Spiraling Out of Control on Solana, Over $3.2M Of SOL Crypto Extracted In October

Assume you want to buy $1M worth of a top trending meme coin on Solana or Ethereum. Technically, you can. There’s nothing preventing you from buying any moonshot token. All you have to do is smash buy, say on Uniswap or Raydium, and there you go.

If you don’t really care about how much you will receive, then no problem. The only guarantee when you click “buy” and invest $1M scooping up that 1000X meme coin is this: you will likely receive one of the worst fills in the world.

And there is no one to blame. Be it on Solana or Ethereum. With meme coin trading exploding, bot activity extracting every last drop of value from large block transactions, as above, has been getting out of hand on Solana. Bot operators do it through what’s called a sandwich attack, which is not a crime anyway. Just fast bots exploiting the design of Solana’s transaction ordering and processing.

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Sandwich Attacks On Solana Spiralling out of Control

Sandwich attacks are reportedly getting out of hand on Solana to the point that one user took it to X, lamenting the consequences.

As of October 29, when the observer posted, over 864 SOL had been extracted by 3,928 attackers. More than 15,000 victims across Solana’s DeFi ecosystem, he added, were forced to get bad fills.

Sandwich Attacks Are Getting Out of Hand on Solana

In just the past 24 hours, a staggering 864 SOL has been extracted by 3,928 attackers, impacting over 15,900 victims across Solana’s DeFi ecosystem.

More than 15,500 “wide sandwich” attacks were executed, extracting 864 SOL… pic.twitter.com/YgZ1f5ByiW

— Dave (@ItsDave_ADA) October 29, 2025

Notably, the majority were “wide” sandwich attacks, where the bot would front and back-run transactions across multiple slots. Interestingly, in wide sandwich attacks, the validator holds the victim’s transaction in “leader”, allowing them to insert front or back runs in later slots.

As it turns out, wide sandwich attacks are lucrative for validators. Moreover, to their advantage, they can be difficult to detect since the victim’s transaction could be anywhere from 10 to 100 transactions apart, requiring complex cross-slot tracing.

It is the proliferation of these attacks that leads the observer to think that, although Solana is designed for speed, it does not reward fairness. The priority on fees provides bots with an avenue to exploit how Solana orders and processes transactions, potentially extracting billions every year.

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Jito Crack Down, Validators Banned

In October 2025, over 18,000 SOL were extracted from over 202,000 victims trying to swap across Solana DeFi protocols. There were over 51,000 attackers who cumulatively spent less than 340 SOL.

Just yesterday, on October 30, two bots raked over 46 SOL after spending less than 0.1 SOL running their sandwich attacks.

Sandwich attacks on Solana are getting out of hand. Over $3.2M of SOL extracted in October 2025 alone. Jito banned 15 more validators

(Source: Sandwiched)

Jito, one of the main providers of block building on Solana, has been cracking down.

Recently, they banned 15 more validators after overwhelming evidence showed that they were enablers of sandwich attacks.

After analyzing over 16 months of data, one analyst flagged 23 validators who primarily staked via Jito and Marinade pools.

Sandwich attacks on Solana are getting out of hand. Over $3.2M of SOL extracted in October 2025 alone. Jito banned 15 more validators

(Source: 0xGhostLogs, X)

He noted that over +6% of their leader slots contained wide sandwich attacks primarily targeting retail traders. Of the 23, six also received subsidies from the Solana Foundation.

Besides Jito, the Solana Foundation had ousted over 30 validators found to be enabling MEV in 2024.

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