A New Era of MEV on Solana

By Daniel Tao @ bloXroute Labs

Solana’s MEV landscape has entered a new phase — one where malicious validators rather than external bots have taken center stage. For over a year, MEV protection relied heavily on Jito bundles, which enforced “do-not-front-run” rules through trusted relays.

But recent data shows this approach is no longer enough. According to Ghost’s year-long analysis of Solana trades, wide (multi-slot) sandwiches — attacks where the frontrun and backrun occur across different leader slots — have exploded in prevalence, accounting for 93% of all sandwiches and extracting over 529,000 SOL in the past year.

These attacks evade traditional single-slot detectors and exploit validator-led control over transaction ordering. In other words, MEV has moved from the mempool to the validator set.

What changed under the hood

To meet this new threat model, bloXroute’s Solana Trader API introduces a multi-path, leader-aware submission system designed to adapt in real time to changing validator risk conditions

🔹 Leader-aware MEV protection

Our infrastructure now scores current and upcoming slot leaders in real time, identifying validators with an elevated risk of malicious ordering.

• High-risk leaders (identified through sandwich correlations and validator behavior analytics) are delayed or skipped.
• Low-risk leaders receive accelerated submission through staked connections, improving both protection and time-to-land.

This dynamic scheduling improves both safety (avoiding predatory slots) and speed-to-land during trustworthy leadership periods.

🔹 Multi-path frontRunningProtection (FRP)

Instead of depending solely on Jito relays, frontRunningProtection=true now routes transactions via Jito + Paladin + bloXroute’s propagation channels. This ensures redundancy and mitigates bundle-leak risk, especially against leaders suspected of colluding with attackers.

🔹 Integrated submitProtection tiers

FRP now defaults to SP_MEDIUM for balanced protection and speed, while SP_HIGH provides stricter ordering and landing safeguards.

🔹 Optional revertProtection

Enable revertProtection=true to prevent failed transactions from landing on-chain — useful for atomic or conditional strategies, though it introduces latency.

The reason: validator-run sandwiching is the new frontier

The shift to leader-controlled MEV extraction represents a structural change in Solana’s risk surface. The Malicious Validator Sandwich Behaviors research brief highlights several emerging tactics:

• Cross-slot sandwiches, where attackers use multiple consecutive leadership slots to spread attack legs. This has quickly surged from a rare case to the most common sandwich attack pattern. Aligning with Ghost’s finding that 93% of current sandwiches are wide sandwiches.
• Authority-hop and passthrough attacks, where SPL token account ownership temporarily changes hands to obscure attacker identity.
• Bundle-leak exploitation, where pending transactions visible in relays are used to pre-position frontruns in the next slot.

These behaviors exploit validator-level privileges that traditional relay-only systems (like Jito bundles) cannot fully mitigate.

Why leader-aware routing matters

Traditional MEV protection assumed all leaders were equal — but data shows that a handful of validators account for a disproportionate share of sandwich activity.

By integrating leader scoring directly into the transaction routing process, bloXroute ensures that orderflow dynamically avoids these high-risk slots, reducing the chance of being sandwiched by malicious leaders.

This approach strikes a new balance between:

• Leakage risk reduction — Avoiding validators known to reorder or duplicate transactions.
• Time-to-finality optimization — Accelerating landing during low-risk leadership.

Deprecations and migration notes

As part of this rollout (effective October 23, 2025, 14:00 ET):

• fastBestEffort mode is deprecated; calls using it will default to frontRunningProtection.
• Existing users should verify their submitProtection tier and enable revertProtection only when needed.

Example payload:

{

“frontRunningProtection”: true,

“submitProtection”: “SP_MEDIUM”,

“revertProtection”: false

}

Looking forward

The rise of validator-run MEV extraction underscores a fundamental truth: attackers evolve with the protocol.

bloXroute’s leader-aware and multi-path submission framework represents the next generation of MEV protection — one that no longer assumes trust in any single relay or validator set.

As the network continues to decentralize, our focus remains constant:
to deliver fair, efficient, and secure transaction landing for traders and protocols across Solana.