Key Takeaways:
- Sandwich attacks drained up to $500 million from Solana users in 16 months, but coordinated action cut profitability by 60–70% in 2025.
- 415 million SOL is now staked, representing 75% of circulating supply, driven by a sharp rise in native staking and institutional inflows.
- Marinade Finance, Jito, and the Solana Foundation blacklisted 50+ malicious validators, protecting over $2 billion in delegated stake.
Solana’s 2025 staking boom did not come without pain. As participation surged, so did MEV-driven exploitation. What followed was one of the most aggressive, coordinated crackdowns on validator-level abuse the ecosystem has seen.
Sandwich Attacks: A $500 Million Problem Finally Confronted
For over a year, sandwich attacks quietly siphoned value from everyday Solana users. Research estimates show that between $370 million and $500 million was extracted over a 16-month period, with roughly 0.72% of all blocks containing some form of sandwich activity.
The mechanics were simple but brutal. Malicious validators or bots detected pending trades, inserted their own transactions before and after the victim’s order, and pocketed the price difference. On Solana’s ultra-fast network, low fees and high throughput made these attacks cheap to execute and hard to avoid.
Some validators abused their position heavily. Data shows certain operators included sandwich attacks in up to 27% of the blocks they produced, turning block production into a private profit engine at users’ expense. At the beginning of 2025, grievances regarding slippage and front-running were no longer to be disregarded.
A Coordinated Ecosystem Response in 2025
How Solana Reduced MEV Abuse by Up to 70%
This was the turning point which was delivered by several stakeholders simultaneously. Marinade Finance was among the most forceful, blacklisting over 50 of its Stake Auction Marketplace validators who were caught attacking sandwiches. This is the only measure that has protected more than $2 billion in delegated SOL by stopping bad actors instead of using soft deterrents.
On the infrastructure level, in March 2025 Jito Foundation closed its public mempool, eliminating the most easily available source of transaction sniffing and front-running. This removed the least friction attack point at night.
Meanwhile, the Solana Foundation removed malicious validators from its delegation programs, signaling that MEV abuse would no longer be tolerated as a “grey area” behavior.
The result was measurable. Profitability from sandwich attacks dropped an estimated 60–70%, and user complaints tied to front-running and excessive slippage fell by roughly 60% across major Solana DEXs. The attacks did not disappear, but they became harder, riskier, and less lucrative.
Solana Staking Hits a Structural Inflection Point
Security improvements landed at the same time Solana staking reached new highsBy the end of 2025, approximately 415 million SOL was staked, and it had reached 75% of total participation in the network. Transactions were also at their highest point of about 600 million on a weekly basis and institutional inflows in the third quarter was estimated to be $530 million. It was more than a change of scale, but composition.
Read More: Solana Price Prediction 2025–2050: 500% Gains by 2050 – Is It Worth Investing?
Native Staking Closes the Gap with Liquid Staking
Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) ruled the years as they were flexible and able to be used in DeFi. In 2025, that balance shifted. Native staking took off as protocols sealed out old usability holes. The native staking TVL of Marinade increased 21% quarter-to-quarter to 5.3 million SOL and surpassed its liquid staking token mSOL.
Cleaner UX and instant exit tools directly delegating out of self-custody wallets did not feel restrictive anymore. Native staking is an opportunity to provide yield with no smart contract layers, rehypothecation, or regulatory uncertainty to institutions and risk-conscious holders.
Liquid staking did not die out. It was the default selection when it comes to DeFi-intensive strategies. But native staking proved to be the “clean” choice of capital that focused on clarity of custody and minimization of protocol risk.
Beyond the numbers on the headline are a varied staking base. Small retail wallets were on the increase, and middle sized crypto-native funds began to optimize delegation actively in terms of uptime, MEV policies and performance. A rather small set of big custodial and institutional holders continued to have a disproportionate stake in staked SOL at the top end. Behavior also evolved. In 2025, it was no longer a “set and forget” staking.
