Solana sandwich bots extract 29.7 million from Pump.fun

Sandwich bots extracted approximately 29.7 million dollars before costs from Solana trades over an 11-month period, primarily targeting the memecoin platform Pump.fun and its PumpSwap exchange. An investigation revealed 96% of detected attacks occurred during Pump.fun's launch curve. The analysis identified 6,850,144 attacks by 2,545 bot wallets affecting 2,154,994 distinct wallets from October 30, 2025, to October 7, 2026. Notably, other bots accounted for 39% of the estimated gross take. A sandwich attack involves a bot purchasing and selling tokens around another trader's swap, raising the pool price and resulting in the trader receiving fewer tokens. The cost is incurred through execution, even if the swap is completed successfully. Trades allowing 20%-50% slippage were sandwiched 14 times more often than those with under 3% slippage. Attack rates varied with slippage tolerance, with trades below 0.5% tolerance being hit more frequently than those at 1%-3%. The 29.7 million dollar estimate reflects SOL's value at the time of each attack and does not account for net profit. In a separate sample of 63 attacks, bots retained 68% of gross proceeds, with 18 attacks resulting in losses after costs. The report also highlights inconsistencies in Pump.fun's sale-fee recording, affecting gross estimates by about 3%. Bitquery's methodology involved identifying bots through repeated trading patterns and excluding certain trades, but chain records cannot definitively prove prior knowledge of orders.

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