The $500M Sandwich Problem: Inside Solana's MEV Crisis and Protocol Defenses

Sandwich attacks silently extract nearly $500M annually from Solana users through MEV manipulation, degrading prices on every swap. As attacks evolve into sophisticated multi-slot techniques that bypass traditional detection, understanding these mechanisms becomes critical for trader security. Protocol-level defenses—including Firedancer—represent Solana's shift toward solving MEV at the consensus layer rather than the application level, fundamentally reshaping how fair trading works.