MEV & Sandwich Attacks

Glossary · Market Structure

MEV — maximal extractable value — is profit taken by whoever orders transactions in a block. A sandwich attack is its retail-facing form: a bot sees your swap pending, buys just before it to push the price up, lets your trade fill worse, and sells just after. Your slippage tolerance is the size of the sandwich you agreed to eat.

"You set slippage to 5% so the trade goes through. The bot read that as 'take up to 5% from me' and did."

Public mempools expose pending swaps; a searcher bot simulates the trade, front-runs it with a buy that moves the pool price, and back-runs it with a sell — pocketing the difference your slippage allowed. Thin pools and generous slippage settings make the largest sandwiches, which is why memecoin launches are a feeding ground. Private transaction relays and tight slippage are the defences; some chains and DEX routers offer protection by default.

Why a trader sees it in the data: the buys and sells around a launch include a great deal of bot volume that is not conviction, and the first minutes of trading on a new token are dominated by snipers and sandwichers. Our cabal work reconstructs the early ledger to separate the wallets that kept the tokens from the bots that flipped them in the same block.

Meme tape: every launch's buys, sells and risk flags (free sign-in)

Related jargon

Questions

What is MEV & Sandwich Attacks in crypto trading?

MEV — maximal extractable value — is profit taken by whoever orders transactions in a block. A sandwich attack is its retail-facing form: a bot sees your swap pending, buys just before it to push the price up, lets your trade fill worse, and sells just after. Your slippage tolerance is the size of the sandwich you agreed to eat.

How would a trader say it?

You set slippage to 5% so the trade goes through. The bot read that as 'take up to 5% from me' and did.

Part of the Crypto Jargon glossary — every term, decoded the way a trader would say it.

Crypto Jargon

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