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When Anza lead economist Max Resnick recently appeared on Lightspeed, I asked him questions that are frequently raised in conversations about Solana’s economics. What to do about the sandwich attack issue?
His answer surprised me. “The sandwich rate (IS) has dropped considerably,” Resnick said.
The speed of Solana makes it an ideal venue for timing games at the expense of unsleek users. Sandwich attacks occur when toxic market participants boost and back up trading to make profits at the expense of traders.
Sandwiches have historically been a major concern for Solana and its developers. In early 2024, Solana Infrastructure Shop Jito closed Mempool over sandwich concerns. A few months later, the Solana Foundation cut the Sandwicher allegations from the stake delegation program. Jito’s Dao blacklisted malicious validators from its stake pool.
However, none of these fixes were found to be Panacea, and the sandwich attack continued.
However, Resnick says the sandwich attacks were slowed by their lack of blacklisting by improving Solana’s code, rather than BlackListing Bad Actors, which could potentially re-emerge with different online identities.
Essentially, sandwich attacks are numbers games for attackers.
In 2024, when the landing transaction on Solana was much more difficult, transactions were sprayed widely on the Valitter in the hopes of getting user transactions into the blockchain. This gave the toxic validator a chance to see many transactions and front them. With Solana’s “targeting” improved, Sandwichers have fewer opportunities to ruin transactions, as each transaction is seen on average fewer validators, Resnick said.
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