Solana sandwich bots took $29.7 M before costs
Sandwich bots extracted about $29.7 million earlier than prices from Solana trades over an 11-month interval, in keeping with blockchain information supplier Bitquery. It discovered 96% of detected assaults on memecoin platform Pump.enjoyable’s launch curve and its PumpSwap alternate.
The investigation, protecting profitable swaps, counted 6,850,144 assaults by 2,545 bot wallets affecting 2,154,994 distinct wallets between October 30, 2025, and October 7, 2026. These addresses don’t characterize a depend of particular person folks: different bots’ trades accounted for 39% of the estimated gross take.
A sandwich locations a bot’s buy and sale round one other dealer’s swap. The primary buy raises the pool value; the intervening purchaser receives fewer tokens, and the bot sells into the upper value. The fee reaches the dealer via execution, even when the swap completes efficiently.
Extensive slippage marked larger publicity
Amongst trades despatched by swap router Jupiter via Pump.enjoyable’s launch curve or PumpSwap, trades permitting 20%–50% slippage have been sandwiched 14 occasions as typically as these permitting underneath 3%, Bitquery discovered.
Slippage tolerance units how far execution can depart from a quote. Jupiter’s documentation describes a minimum acceptable output after making use of that tolerance. A value transfer past the restrict may cause a swap to fail; a wider restrict permits a worse fill. That creates a tradeoff between finishing a unstable commerce and limiting the value concession accepted alongside the best way.
The noticed assault charges didn’t rise uniformly with each wider setting. Trades under 0.5% tolerance have been hit extra typically than these at 1%–3%, whereas the 50%-or-more band was hit much less typically than the 20%–50% band.
The slippage comparability is observational and covers Jupiter routes via Pump.enjoyable’s launch curve or PumpSwap. Jupiter carried solely a small share of all sufferer trades within the investigation.
The $29.7 million estimate values SOL on the minute of every assault and doesn’t measure web revenue. In Bitquery’s separate 63-attack payment pattern, bots retained 68% of mixture gross proceeds, and 18 assaults misplaced cash after prices. That pattern doesn’t set up web earnings for the total interval. The report additionally identifies inconsistent Pump.enjoyable sale-fee recording that impacts its gross estimate by about 3%.
Bitquery used repeated buying and selling patterns to establish bots, excluded spherical journeys starting in a token’s first 10 slots, and studies gaps in alternate and block protection. Chain data can not show a bot noticed an order beforehand, and a few qualifying wallets could also be quick merchants.
Slippage limits deal with the value a dealer will settle for. A separate research preprint submitted September 23, 2026 examined protected order stream, that means transactions supposed to be shielded from front-running, throughout six blockchains. Its authors discovered sandwich patterns extending throughout trades and blocks and concluded these protections can supply weaker ensures than customers count on.
