Solana Foundations takes action against validators who enable sandwich attacks

Since quite some time, sandwich bots are causing havoc in the Solana Network. To combat these attacks, The Solana Foundation removed a group validator operators.

These operators were involved in the execution of this operation. “sandwich attacks” Solana Users

Final Word from the Solana Foundation

Tim Garcia of Solana Validator Relations, Tim Garcia’s Discord lead for the foundation, announced that the decisions made were final. Enforcement actions will continue until they find operators engaging in activities such as mempooling, which enable sandwich attacks.

“Anyone found engaging in such activity will be rejected from the program, and any stake from the Foundation will be immediately and permanently removed.”

Mert Mumtaz is the cofounder of Solana RPC, Helius. This move is to make sure that foundations do not delegate validators to conduct malicious attacks against retail users.

Mumtaz clarified Sandwich attacks are malicious forms of maximum extractable value (MEV), which ensures retail customers always receive the lowest prices, while attackers reap all the profits. Solana is designed to prevent such attacks by default, but some attackers modified validators so that they could sandwich.

In the future, he said that other stakeholder pools may adopt policies similar to his own against sandwich attacks.

“Sandwich Attacks”

This decision is welcome, given that MEVs are often used to scan Solana’s network looking for token purchasers. The bots jump to the front of the queue, placing a huge order before the actual user can process their order.

This tactic increases the price of tokens. The bots profit by selling their tokens higher after the user has completed the transaction at the increased price.