WIDE SANDWICH ATTACKS EXPLAINED

Summary from the TLDR Crypto newsletter

Wide sandwich attacks spanning multiple slots now account for 93% of all sandwiches on Solana, with bots extracting 529,000 SOL over a full year by frontrunning and backrunning victim transactions across different slots that evade standard detectors. January marked peak extraction at 87,000 SOL in one month, though monthly extraction remains steady at 30-60k SOL, with top bots waiting for high-value victims and averaging 0.46 SOL per sandwich by sending dual bundles containing frontrun and first break-even backrun, followed by second backrun to capture remaining profit. Axiom users suffered 70%+ of extracted SOL, followed by Bloom at 10-15% and Photon at 5-10%, while 23 validators had at least 6% of leader slots containing wide sandwiches, suggesting private order flow sharing with main stake from Marinade and Jito, including six receiving Solana Foundation stake. Low-cap token buyers face the highest risk due to low liquidity creating high price impact and default slippage settings.