The post Lightspeed Newsletter: Solana users are still getting frontrun appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter. Howdy! Since it’s national poking fun at the British week: It’s a Chewsday, innit! And speaking of chewing, a bit more on those pesky sandwiches: Solana’s sandwich attackers are hanging around In early June, the Solana Foundation blocked a group of validators found to be participating in private mempools that facilitate “sandwich attacks” from receiving a delegation from the foundation’s stake. The Solana Foundation is a non-profit entity developing the Solana network. It has a sizable stake of solana tokens that it delegates with the goal of diversifying the field of Solana validators. Validators who help facilitate sandwich attacking — or front-running user transactions to manipulate prices and pocket the difference — shouldn’t be recipients of what are essentially grants from the Solana Foundation, the thinking went. The foundation’s announcement came with a groundswell of anti-sandwich activity: Jito’s DAO proposed to blacklist malicious validators, and Stakewiz began labeling known sandwich attackers, to name a couple examples. More recently, the popular Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden introduced “mempool protection” that keeps user buys from being replaced. But nearly a month later, Solana’s sandwich attack woes don’t seem to have abated. A dashboard crafted by the data outfit GhostGraph shows these sorts of attacks happening every couple seconds, and the Discord channel where Solana’s validators talk shop is still cloudy on the path forward. A couple things appear evident from GhostGraph’s dashboard: First, the several sandwich attacks being tracked per minute are memecoin swaps, meaning unsophisticated retail traders are being exploited by more savvy sandwichers. Second, these transactions are being processed through reputable block leaders, which are the validators who create given blocks.  That’s not to say these leaders are bad actors:…

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Filed under: News - @ July 2, 2024 8:10 pm