Howdy!

I ruffled a few feathers on X today, so let me be clear: Sorry to yuck some folks’ yum, but I can’t comprehend why people use DoorDash/Uber Eats/any food delivery services. Leaving home to pick up non-insanely upcharged food is a worthwhile use of time.

Today, we’ve got the decline of Solana sandwiching and an ICYMI from this week in Solana:

Solana sandwich attacks ‘way down’: Anza’s Max Resnick

When Anza’s lead economist Max Resnick came on Lightspeed recently, I asked him a question that frequently gets brought up in conversations about Solana’s economics: What should be done about the sandwich attack problem?

His answer surprised me. “The sandwiching rate [is] way down,” Resnick said. 

Solana’s speed makes it an ideal venue for timing games at the expense of unsophisticated users. A sandwich attack happens when a toxic market participant both frontruns and backruns a trade to profit at the expense of the trader.

Sandwiching has historically been a big concern for Solana and its developers. In early 2024, Solana infrastructure shop Jito shut down its mempool over sandwiching concerns. A couple months later, the Solana Foundation cut suspected sandwichers from its stake delegation program. Jito’s DAO also voted to blacklist malicious validators from its stake pool. 

None of these fixes turned out to be panaceas, however, and the sandwich attacks continued. 

But the story Resnick tells is that sandwich attacking was blunted not by blacklisting bad actors — who may be able to re-emerge with a different online identity — but by improving Solana’s code.

Basically, sandwich attacks are numbers games for the attackers.

In 2024, when landing transactions on Solana was much more difficult, transactions were sprayed widely to validators in hopes of getting user transactions to the blockchain. This meant toxic validators saw a lot of transactions and had more chances to frontrun them. As Solana’s transaction “targeting” has improved, fewer validators see each transaction on average, so sandwichers have fewer opportunities to mess with transactions, Resnick said.

Now, “a 10% stake that’s sandwiching is able to see only 10% of the transactions, which is what it should be,” Resnick added.

The data seems to bear this point out as well. A report from sandwich attack tracker Ghost shows Solana sandwichers profited less in March and April of this year than in the same months last year — despite the fact that the chain’s REV was roughly the same during both periods.

Ghost’s report also said Solana stake pool provider Marinade had become the primary staking source for sandwichers. In response, Marinade has begun penalizing sandwich attackers using its stake auction marketplace.

— Jack Kubinec

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We are past peak sandwich:

This visualization from Ghost’s report shows Solana saw the most extraction in November 2024 before tapering off in recent months.

Although the difference isn’t stunning, if you overlay this chart against Solana REV, you can tell that sandwich attacks have proportionally declined over the past year.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solana land this week:

• Pump.fun acquired the onchain trading protocol Kolscan, built by 0xbor. Known for real-time wallet tracking, PnL dashboards and copy trading insights, Kolscan now gains faster data, a fairer leaderboard and deeper integration into Pump's vision of crypto as a social experience.

• Robinhood re-listed and opened staking for $SOL in the US a year after removing it in response to SEC scrutiny. Just another drop in the bucket when it comes to shifting regulatory postures, but it does seem to signal Robinhood's readiness to re-engage with Solana and friends now that winds have changed.

• Texture was hit with a $2.2m vault exploit targeting its rebalance function. The attack stemmed from a missed permissions check in an audited (but not formally verified) contract. Texture and Certora formed a war room, reproduced the exploit, patched it with strict ownership checks and confirmed the fix in impressively short order. Most funds were recovered and a joint post-mortem is coming next week, says the team.

• Jupiter Mobile went live on Saga's Solana dapp Store. Users can now send any token to anyone (even if they don't have a wallet), track every asset in real time, set native limit orders with instant alerts and swap with MEV protection and zero gas.

• Marinade appointed former NYDFS counsel and BlockFi AML lead Zalika Headley as its new general counsel. With Marinade Select already powering the Canary Solana ETF and striking deals with BitGo, Copper and Zodia, this seems to be yet another lock-in on credibility just as staking demand shifts from retail hype to enterprise-grade trust.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito: