ARCIPEDIA · DEFI · INTERMEDIATE

Plain English

A sandwich attack is two front-running trades around yours: the bot buys before your buy (pushing price up), lets your trade execute (pushing it up more), then sells immediately after (capturing the rise). You get a worse fill, the attacker books the spread minus gas.

How it actually works

Same mempool monitoring as plain front-running, but the bot executes a paired trade — buy in the same block before yours, sell in the same block after. Profitable only when the slippage you tolerate is wider than the bot’s round-trip cost (gas + fees). Tightening slippage tolerance directly limits this.

What it means for you

Two protections worth using: (1) Tighten slippage to the lowest value that still fills — typically 0.5% on liquid pairs. (2) Route through MEV-aware infrastructure (MEV Blocker, CoW Swap, 1inch Fusion) that batches trades or hides them from public sandwich bots.

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Educational content only. Not investment, tax, or legal advice.