Sandwich bots executed 6,850,144 attacks on Solana trades between October 30, 2025 and October 7, 2026, extracting approximately $29.7 million in gross proceeds before costs, according to blockchain data provider Bitquery. The attacks concentrated on memecoin platforms, with 96% of detected incidents targeting Pump.fun’s launch curve and PumpSwap.
A sandwich attack places a bot’s purchase and sale around another trader’s swap, raising the pool price so the intervening buyer receives fewer tokens while the bot sells into the artificially higher price. Bitquery identified 2,545 bot wallets responsible for the attacks and found that 2,154,994 distinct wallets were affected across the period.
Slippage Tolerance and Attack Frequency
Trades allowing 20% to 50% slippage were sandwiched 14 times as often as those permitting under 3% slippage on Jupiter routes through Pump.fun or PumpSwap. The attack frequency did not rise uniformly with wider slippage settings: trades below 0.5% tolerance were hit more often than those at 1% to 3%, while the 50%-or-more band was hit less often than the 20% to 50% band.
Profitability and Costs
The $29.7 million figure represents gross extraction valued at the minute of each attack and does not measure net profit. A separate analysis of 63 attacks showed bots retained only 68% of aggregate gross proceeds after costs, with 18 attacks losing money once fees were deducted. This indicates the net figure for the full 11-month period is substantially lower than the gross extraction.
Of the gross proceeds captured, 39% came from other bots’ trades rather than retail traders. Bitquery identified bots using repeated trading patterns and excluded round trips beginning in a token’s first 10 slots to reduce false positives.
Methodology and Limitations
Chain records cannot prove a bot saw an order beforehand, and some qualifying wallets may represent fast traders rather than sandwich bots. Bitquery noted a 3% impact from Pump.fun’s sale-fee recording inconsistency on the gross extraction estimate. The source did not name individual bot operators or provide a complete breakdown of which other bots accounted for the 39% of proceeds derived from bot-to-bot trades.
On September 23, 2026, a research preprint on protected order flow was submitted, suggesting growing attention to sandwich attack mitigation on Solana.
