The Solana Foundation removed some validator operators from its delegation program for launching sandwich attacks on retail traders. This move is part of a broader effort to reduce Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) and preserve trust in the protocol’s ecosystem.

Solana Validator Relations Lead Tim Garcia announced on the Foundation's official Discord channel that malicious operators are being removed due to their involvement in sandwich attacks. “Enforcement actions are ongoing as we detect operators participating in mempools which allow sandwich attacks,” he wrote.

On May 7, a post by Garcia had laid down rules by the Solana Foundation that made sandwich attacks illegal.

Sandwich attacks have become increasingly common in the DeFi markets, with victims paying a higher price than they should for a crypto asset they are buying. Sandwich attacks occur when an attacker places two transactions around a victim's transaction to manipulate the price and profit from the price difference.

Garcia said that operators engaged in “malicious activities such as participating in a private mempool to sandwich attack transactions or otherwise harming Solana users will not be tolerated by the delegation program.” Anyone found engaging in such activity will be rejected from the program and any stake from the Foundation will be immediately and permanently removed,” Garcia added when making the announcement of the operators being removed.

Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Solana RPC provider Helius took to X to praise the move that will ensure that the foundation does not delegate to validators who carry out malicious sandwich attacks on retail users. Certain operators have added mods to their validators to enable sandwiching on Solana, he explained.

The Solana Foundation Delegation Program subsidized validators by allocating a significant portion of Solana tokens to them, drastically reducing the need for them to have a huge capital. This delegation allows users to assign staking rights to validators who are in charge of creating blocks and verifying transactions.

However, an issue arises when certain validators manipulate transactions to take advantage of retail traders in order to increase their Maximum Extractable Value (MEV), which is the maximum value validators can gain from including, reordering, or excluding transactions when creating a new block.

Image Source: Bloomberg