Sandwich Attack
An MEV attack where a searcher frontruns your buy (pushing the price up), lets your trade execute at the inflated price, then backruns with a sell to profit from the impact. Copy trades are especially exposed.
In detail
A sandwich attack is the classic MEV play against a retail order. The searcher sees your pending transaction, places their own buy immediately before yours (frontrun), and their sell immediately after (backrun). Your trade executes at a worse price than it would have without them, and the searcher pockets the difference. On Solana, sandwich attacks are much less common than on Ethereum because there's no persistent public mempool — but copy-trade orders are uniquely exposed because the pattern is predictable (target buys, you predictably buy ~800ms later). The defense is Jito bundle submission: bundled transactions land atomically in a single slot, denying searchers the window to interpose.
Key points
- Frontrun buy + backrun sell around your order
- Exploits predictable trade patterns (like copy trades)
- Less common on Solana than Ethereum, but not zero
- Primary defense: Jito bundle submission
- Subglow bundles every copy order by default