MEV Bots on Solana Explained: How They Steal Your Money (And How to Stop Them)

MEV Bots on Solana Explained: How They Steal Your Money (And How to Stop Them)

If you've ever swapped a token on Solana and noticed you received slightly fewer tokens than expected, you might have been a victim of an MEV bot. You're not alone — sandwich bots have extracted an estimated $370 million to $500 million from Solana traders over just a 16-month period, according to analysis from Sandwiched.me.

This guide breaks down exactly what MEV bots are, how they target your trades, and what you can do to protect yourself. No technical background required.

What Is MEV?

MEV stands for Maximal Extractable Value (originally "Miner Extractable Value" on Ethereum, but the concept is the same on Solana). It refers to the profit that someone can extract by manipulating the order of transactions inside a block.

On Solana, the validator producing the current block gets to decide which transactions go in and in what order. This creates an opportunity: if someone can see your trade before it's finalized, they can place their own trades around yours to profit at your expense.

Think of it like this: imagine you're at an auction, about to bid on an item. Someone with insider knowledge sees your bid before you place it, buys the item a split second before you at a lower price, then immediately sells it to you at a higher price. That's essentially what MEV bots do with your token swaps.

Types of MEV on Solana

Not all MEV is malicious. Here's a quick breakdown of the main types:

Arbitrage (Mostly Harmless)

Arbitrage bots find price differences between DEXs and balance them out. If SOL is $140 on Jupiter but $141 on Raydium, an arb bot will buy low and sell high until prices equalize. This actually helps the ecosystem by keeping prices consistent across platforms. Arbitrage bots typically pay 50–60% of their profits as tips to validators.

Liquidations (Useful)

When a borrower's collateral drops below the required ratio on lending protocols like Kamino or Marginfi, liquidation bots repay the loan and claim the collateral at a discount. This keeps DeFi lending protocols healthy and solvent. Without liquidation bots, bad debt would pile up and protocols could become insolvent.

Sandwich Attacks (Predatory)

This is the one you need to worry about. Sandwich attacks are specifically designed to extract value from regular traders like you. They account for the vast majority of harmful MEV on Solana, and they've become a massive, organized industry.

How Sandwich Attacks Work (Step by Step)

A sandwich attack has three steps, all happening within the same block (about 400 milliseconds on Solana):

Step 1: The Bot Spots Your Trade

You submit a swap — say, buying 10 SOL worth of a memecoin on Raydium. Before your transaction is finalized, an MEV bot detects it. On Solana, this happens through private mempools and direct validator connections (more on that below).

Step 2: The Front-Run

The bot instantly submits a buy order for the same token before your trade executes. This pushes the price up. The bot pays a "tip" to the validator to ensure its transaction is placed right before yours.

Step 3: The Back-Run

Your trade now executes at the inflated price — you get fewer tokens than you expected. Immediately after, the bot sells its tokens at the higher price your trade pushed it to, pocketing the difference.

The result: You paid more than you should have. The bot made a profit. And you probably didn't even notice.

A Real Example

Let's say you're buying a memecoin at $0.001 per token with 10 SOL:

Without sandwich attack: You'd get ~1,000,000 tokens
Bot front-runs you: Buys tokens first, pushing price to $0.00105
Your trade executes: You get ~952,380 tokens instead (about 5% fewer)
Bot back-runs: Sells tokens at the higher price, profits ~0.5 SOL
Your loss: ~47,620 tokens you should have received

Multiply that by thousands of victims per day, and the numbers get staggering.

The Scale of the Problem

The data on MEV on Solana is eye-opening:

$370M–$500M extracted by sandwich bots over 16 months (Jan 2024 – May 2025)
8.5 billion trades analyzed across $1 trillion in DEX volume
Some individual bots have earned $30 million+ in just two months
The B91 bot alone executed 82,000 sandwich attacks and victimized 78,800 traders in a single 30-day period
At peak, some bots carry out 4,000+ attacks per day
Over 50% of Solana's transactions are estimated to be failed arbitrage attempts (bot spam)
At least 100 traders get sandwiched every hour, every single day

Notorious MEV Bots

Some of the most well-known sandwich bots on Solana include:

arsc — One of the first bots to gain public attention, accumulating ~$30 million in two months during mid-2024. The operator tried to hide activity across multiple wallets.
B91 — Ranked #1 on Sandwiched.me, extracting 7,800 SOL gross profit in 30 days from nearly 80,000 victims. Peaked at 4,925 attacks in a single day.
DeezNode — Executed over 1 million transactions in one month, extracting about 65,880 SOL (~$13 million at the time).
Ai4zq...VXKKT — Generated approximately $287 million in profits over six months, using batches of addresses to avoid detection.

How Do Bots See Your Transaction?

You might wonder: Solana doesn't have a public mempool like Ethereum, so how do bots see pending transactions?

The Jito Era (2022–2024)

In November 2022, Jito launched a public mempool for Solana that made it easy for searchers to view pending transactions. This led to an explosion of sandwich attacks. Due to community backlash, Jito shut down its public mempool in March 2024.

Private Mempools (2024–Present)

After Jito's public mempool closed, MEV didn't disappear — it moved underground. Bots now operate through:

Private mempools run by validators or third parties
Direct validator connections — some validators share transaction data with MEV operators in exchange for a cut of the profits
QUIC/Turbine monitoring — validators can see transactions arriving before they're finalized, giving them microsecond-level insight

The Validator Problem

This is the uncomfortable truth about MEV on Solana: some validators are actively participating in sandwich attacks. Because the current block leader controls transaction ordering, a malicious validator can:

See your incoming swap
Insert their own buy transaction before yours
Place a sell order after yours
Pocket the difference

Data from Sandwiched.me shows the average "sandwich rate" for validators is around 5%, but some outliers reach 30–60%. One validator holding just 0.14% of total stake was responsible for approximately 12.5% of all SOL extracted through sandwich attacks on the network.

The Solana Foundation has removed validators from its delegation program for participating in sandwich attacks, and Jito executed a governance proposal to blacklist nefarious validators. But the cat-and-mouse game continues.

Wide Sandwiching: The New Threat

MEV bots have evolved. "Wide" or "blind" sandwiching — where the front-run and back-run happen across different block slots rather than the same one — has exploded from about 1% to 30% of all sandwich attacks. According to bloXroute's analysis, wide sandwiches now account for 93% of all sandwiches, extracting over 529,000 SOL in the past year. These attacks evade traditional single-slot detection and are much harder to protect against.

Who Gets Hit the Hardest?

Not every trade gets sandwiched. You're most at risk if you:

Trade memecoins — Low liquidity means larger price impact, making sandwiching more profitable
Use high slippage settings — If you set 5% slippage, a bot can exploit nearly all of that range
Make large swaps — Bigger trades move prices more, creating bigger profit opportunities for bots
Trade on PumpSwap, Raydium, or Orca — These are the most targeted DEXs (Raydium accounts for ~72% of attacks)
Trade during high-volatility periods — Token launches, trending memes, and market pumps attract more bot activity

How to Protect Yourself

Here's the good news: you're not powerless. There are real, practical steps you can take to dramatically reduce your chances of getting sandwiched.

1. Use Low Slippage Settings

This is the single most important thing you can do. Sandwich bots exploit your slippage tolerance — if you set it to 5%, they can extract up to 5% of your trade value.

Set slippage to 0.5–1% for stable pairs (SOL/USDC)
Set slippage to 1–3% for volatile tokens
Only increase slippage above 3% if your transaction keeps failing, and lower it back immediately after

Yes, lower slippage means some trades will fail. That's actually a feature — a failed trade costs you a fraction of a cent in fees, while a sandwiched trade can cost you 1–5% of your swap.

2. Use Trading Bots with MEV Protection

Most serious Solana trading bots now include anti-MEV features built in:

These bots send your transaction directly to validators through private channels (like Jito bundles) rather than broadcasting them publicly, so MEV bots can't see your trade before it executes.

3. Use Jito Tips (Properly)

Jito's system allows you to pay a small tip (starting around ~$0.04 during normal conditions) to have your transaction processed privately through a Jito validator. This shields your trade from the public transaction pool.

However, it's not a magic shield. Data shows that 25% of traders who used MEV protection still lost money to sandwich attacks — because wide sandwiches and validator-level MEV can bypass Jito's protections. Use Jito tips as one layer of defense, not your only one.

4. Split Large Trades

Instead of swapping 50 SOL at once, break it into smaller trades (5–10 SOL each). Smaller trades have less price impact and are less profitable for bots to target. The extra transaction fees on Solana are negligible (fractions of a cent each).

5. Use Limit Orders Instead of Market Orders

When possible, use limit orders instead of market swaps. A limit order only executes at your specified price or better — there's no slippage window for a bot to exploit. Jupiter and several trading bots support limit orders on Solana.

6. Avoid Trading During Peak Bot Activity

MEV bot activity tends to spike during:

If you can wait for calmer periods, you'll face less MEV competition.

7. Check If You've Been Sandwiched

Use these tools to monitor and check for sandwich attacks:

8. Stake with Trusted Validators

If you stake SOL, avoid validators with high sandwich rates. Tools like Sandwiched.me's validator page let you check which validators are associated with MEV activity. Red flags include:

No social media presence or website
Can't find them on Stakewiz or Keybase
Unusually high Jito tip income
Sudden rapid increases in stake
Warning symbols on Solflare

What's Being Done About MEV?

The Solana ecosystem is actively fighting MEV on multiple fronts:

Jito Governance Actions

Jito has used governance proposals to blacklist validators known for malicious MEV. In epoch 789, they executed a blacklist of nefarious validators. The Solana Foundation has also removed 32 operators holding 1.5 million SOL (~0.5% of the delegation program's stake) for participating in sandwich attacks.

Yellowstone Shield

One of the newest tools in the anti-MEV arsenal: Yellowstone Shield is an on-chain access control framework that lets applications maintain allowlists and blocklists of validators. When combined with the Yellowstone Jet TPU Client, your application can route transactions directly to trusted validators via QUIC, skipping potentially malicious ones entirely.

bloXroute Leader-Aware Routing

bloXroute's Solana Trader API now features leader-aware transaction routing that scores validators in real time and avoids sending your transactions to high-risk leaders. This dynamically adapts to changing network conditions and validator behavior.

Community Accountability

The Solana community is building social consensus around punishing MEV exploitation. Validators caught sandwiching face stake reduction, delegation removal, and public shaming. Tools like Sandwiched.me have made it much harder for bad actors to operate in the shadows.

MEV Protection: Quick Reference

Protection Method	Difficulty	Effectiveness	Cost
Lower your slippage to 1–3%	Easy	High	Free
Use a trading bot with MEV protection	Easy	High	Free (bot fees apply)
Use Jito tips for private transactions	Easy	Medium-High	~$0.04+ per trade
Split large trades into smaller ones	Easy	Medium	Minimal extra fees
Use limit orders instead of market swaps	Easy	High	Free
Check validators before staking	Medium	Medium	Free
Use Sandwiched.me to monitor attacks	Easy	Informational	Free

The Bottom Line

MEV bots are a real and significant threat on Solana. Sandwich attacks alone have extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from regular traders, and the problem has only grown more sophisticated over time — evolving from public mempool exploitation to validator-level collusion and wide sandwiching across multiple block slots.

But here's the thing: you can dramatically reduce your risk by taking a few simple precautions. Keep your slippage low, use a trading bot with MEV protection, split large trades, and stay informed about which validators to trust.

The Solana community is actively working to make the network fairer, with tools like Sandwiched.me, Yellowstone Shield, and Jito governance proposals putting pressure on bad actors. MEV will likely never be fully eliminated (arbitrage and liquidations are actually beneficial), but predatory sandwich attacks can and should be minimized.

Stay safe out there, and always check your trades.

Useful Tools & Resources

Found this guide helpful? Check out our other guides on how to snipe tokens on Pump.fun, the Solana DeFi beginner's guide, and our complete trading bot comparison.