What Is Sandwich attack?

A sandwich attack is a type of MEV exploitation on decentralised exchanges where an attacker places two transactions around a victim’s trade: a frontrun transaction before and a backrun transaction after. The attacker’s frontrun trade moves the market price against the victim, causing greater slippage, and the backrun trade captures the profit from the artificially created price difference. Sandwich attacks are automated by bots monitoring the public mempool for pending swap transactions. Setting tight slippage tolerances can limit the profitability of sandwich attacks.

See also

• MEV

• Frontrunning

• Slippage

• Decentralised exchange

• Swap