Inside Solana’s Battle Against the Crypto ‘Sandwich Attack’ Menace

Helius CEO, Mert Montaz, recently addressed concerns on X (formerly Twitter) regarding the Solana Foundation Delegation program, following the disqualification of some validators for malpractice.

I’m sure a lot of super honest people who have a perfect understanding of MEV on Solana and the Foundation Delegation program will try to misrepresent reality to feel better about their bags

For those genuinely curious, I’ll summarize:

– a sandwich attack is a malicious form of… pic.twitter.com/KhfGBgGuyT

— mert | helius | hSOL (@0xMert_) June 10, 2024

Montaz explained how a malicious bug, known as a Sandwich attack, can manipulate transactions, causing investors to lose funds while attackers profit. He emphasized that Solana’s lack of a mempool prevents such attacks natively. However, some validators have modified their software to facilitate these attacks on the platform.

Montaz clarified that while the Solana Foundation supports validators by delegating SOL tokens, it takes a strong stance against those who misuse the platform.

“Since people are abusing the system to rob retail and then keep the profits all for themselves — Solana Foundation is not interested in retail users being robbed, especially with their own stake,”

Montaz added that the foundation will withhold token delegations from validators involved in Sandwich attacks. He emphasized that the disqualified validators, representing less than 16% of the total stake, can still operate independently. However, the foundation will not financially incentivize validators who exploit users.

Montaz highlighted the ongoing challenge of MEV on the Solana blockchain. He also pointed to the increasing issue of malicious RPC providers spamming the network with harmful code. However, he reassured users that Helius RPCs do not contribute to this problem and are actively developing an MEV-protected endpoint.

“There are some RPC providers who spam the hell out of the network, which makes this problem much worse than it should be, and then brag about landing rates. Helius RPCs do not do this, and while we don’t have a full mev-protect endpoint yet, we do use swqos and have less fwds.”

Montaz concluded that future stake pools will likely adopt similar policies to discourage exploitative behavior and promote a fairer environment for retail investors.

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