How to avoid getting sandwiched on Solana

Why this matters

A sandwich attack directly worsens your fill and steals from your trade. The usual "just raise slippage" advice makes it worse — the real fixes are different.

Step by step

1. Understand the attack. A bot sees your pending swap, buys ahead to push price up, lets you fill worse, then sells right after. High slippage on a thin pool is what it hunts.
2. Keep slippage as tight as fills allow. On deeper pools, use low slippage. Tighter tolerance gives bots less room to move your fill.
3. Reduce trade size on thin pools. On shallow pools, smaller size lowers your price impact and the profit a sandwich can extract — far more effective than cranking tolerance.
4. Use private transaction routing where available. Routing that keeps your trade out of the public mempool hides it from front-runners.
5. Avoid telegraphing huge visible swaps. A large, visible pending swap on a thin pool is an invitation. Split size or trade deeper venues.
6. Recognize when you were sandwiched. A fill much worse than quoted with two bracketing trades is the signature — adjust size and slippage next time.

Common mistakes to avoid

• "Fixing" bad fills by raising slippage (the opposite of the fix).
• Trading huge size on a thin pool.
• Ignoring private routing options.
• Leaving a wide global slippage setting.
• Not recognizing the sandwich pattern in your fills.

Quick checklist

• ☐ Attack mechanics understood
• ☐ Slippage kept tight on deep pools
• ☐ Size reduced on thin pools
• ☐ Private routing used where possible
• ☐ Large visible swaps avoided
• ☐ Sandwich pattern recognized