MEV
 Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki | |
| part of speech | noun, initialism for maximal extractable value |
|---|---|
| scene | Solana, Jito, trading infrastructure |
Maximal extractable value, profit taken by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions in a block, experienced by trenches traders mainly as sandwich attacks.
MEV, maximal extractable value, is profit extracted by adding, removing, or reordering transactions within a block. Trenches traders experience MEV mainly as the sandwich attack: a bot detects a pending swap large enough to move a pool's price, inserts its own buy just before it (the frontrun), lets the victim's trade execute at a worsened price, and sells immediately after (the backrun), pocketing the difference. Victims see it as unexplained slippage: the fill is worse than the quote.
Mechanics
On Solana, MEV has a distinctive shape because the chain has no traditional public mempool. Extraction is organized around Jito, whose block engine lets searchers submit atomic bundles of transactions with tips for priority placement, the same machinery used for a launch bundle. Jito shut down its public mempool in early 2024 citing the harm of sandwich attacks, but sandwiching continued through private mempools and colluding infrastructure, a fight CoinDesk described as a war between Solana operators and sandwichers. Research published by bloXroute in 2025 reported that multi slot "wide" sandwiches had come to dominate, accounting for over ninety percent of observed sandwiches and extracting hundreds of thousands of SOL in a year. Meme coin traders are prime targets because they trade thin pools with high slippage tolerance; a sniper entry with loose settings is an invitation. Defenses include tighter slippage, MEV protected RPC endpoints, and Jito's DontFront mechanism, introduced to let transactions opt out of being frontrun.
Usage
"Sandwiched" and "MEV'd" are standard trenches complaints on bad fills. The term also appears in accusations that infrastructure operators profit from users, part of the broader pvp sense that every layer of the stack is an adversary.
History
The concept was formalized for Ethereum around 2019 as miner extractable value and generalized as validators replaced miners. Solana's MEV economy grew with Jito's rise from 2023 and the pump.fun trading boom of 2024 and afterward.