This Solana swap app is trying to make sandwich attacks more costly

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Earlier this yr, Solana’s community congestion raised considerations about merchants’ means to land transactions onchain.

Right now, merchants have a a lot simpler time securing trades, however concern has as soon as once more centered on the costs they get in doing so.

Widespread sandwich assaults, during which refined merchants exploit value gaps on the expense of non-sophisticated merchants, have confirmed to be a long-standing and tough downside to unravel. The Solana swap app and market infrastructure firm DFlow introduced an fascinating new answer to the desk once they proposed conditional liquidity, which duties new market intermediaries with separating poisonous and non-toxic order flows.

When a DEX dealer tries to trade one cryptocurrency for one more, he’s provided a value and allowed to set a slippage, which is the share by which the quoted value can change after the order is positioned. Solana sandwich attackers use slippage by means of front-running trades to artificially enhance the value by a couple of foundation factors earlier than promoting the asset for a revenue instantly afterwards, leaving the person with a worse value. In complete, sandwich attackers could make hundreds of thousands a day.

DFlow proposes including a brand new class of market contributors, known as segmenters, to separate poisonous and non-toxic order flows and restrict sandwich assaults.

Segmenters, which shall be chosen initially by DFlow, sit between customers submitting the trades and the DEXs they obtain, primarily sorting good from unhealthy trades. When DEXs obtain these tagged transactions, they’ll cost larger charges to sandwichers and decrease charges to everybody else.

Contingent liquidity “would not fully resolve sandwiching” however can cut back it by charging completely different charges, mentioned DFlow founder Nitesh Nath. “The magnitude of the sandwich discount is proportional to the distinction within the larger fee for poisonous circulation and the decrease fee for non-toxic circulation.”

DFlow has already launched a segmenter known as DFlow Aggregator and a conditional liquidity DEX known as Clearpool.

Segmenters intention to create an order circulation market, the place the higher the value segmenters obtain for customers, the extra order flows DEXs and wallets ship them. Segmenters earn cash by gathering a share of the value enhancements they supply.

“Conditional liquidity aligns the pursuits of outlets, DEXs and the community – a win-win-win for all events concerned. We count on conditional liquidity to be one of many massive breakout developments of 2025,” mentioned JR Reed, companion at DFlow investor Multicoin Capital.

Chris Chung, CEO of Solana swap app Titan, mentioned he believes conditional liquidity can get honest merchants higher costs, but it surely may very well be tough to get DEXs to just accept the brand new market construction. DEXs would not begin altering their charges till there may be sufficient demand for contingent liquidity from the platforms the place merchants place orders, however these platforms may also wish to see DEXs combine this characteristic first.

“It may be a rooster and [egg] downside,” Chung mentioned in a textual content, including that the demand query may very well be partly why DFlow launched its personal segmenter and DEX.

Nath advised me {that a} “handful” of main wallets and apps have inquired about integrating conditional liquidity, although he declined to say which of them.