Jupiter Ultra users face fewer sandwich attacks than others, three-year study finds

Sandwich attacks on Solana are a full-blown epidemic, with 28 million recorded over three years. But traders using Jupiter Ultra appear to be catching significantly fewer of them, according to the first multi-year academic study of protected order flow attacks across major blockchains.

The research, titled “No Place to Hide: An Analysis on Protected Order Flow Sandwich Attacks” and published on arXiv on September 23, 2026, was conducted by researchers from Category Labs, ETH Zurich, Flashbots, and the University of Lisbon. It analyzed sandwich attack activity across Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Base, Arbitrum, and Monad, and the results paint a picture where application-level design choices make an enormous difference in how often users get exploited.

What sandwich attacks actually do

A sandwich attack is when a bot spots your pending swap, places a buy order right before yours to push the price up, then sells immediately after your trade executes at the inflated price. You get worse execution. The bot pockets the difference.

Solana’s architecture makes it particularly fertile ground for this kind of exploitation. Low transaction fees mean bots can attempt sandwich attacks cheaply and at massive scale, while mempool visibility gives them the information they need to front-run trades.

Jupiter Ultra’s numbers versus the competition

The study used something called an “excess ratio” to measure how often users of each application were victimized by sandwich attacks relative to a baseline. Jupiter Ultra recorded an excess ratio of 0.7 overall, meaning its users were actually sandwiched less than you’d statistically expect. In single-victim scenarios, that ratio climbed to 2.0, still well below the competition.

The contrast with other Solana trading terminals is stark. Axiom clocked in at 18.9. Photon hit 11.1. BullX and GMGN also exceeded ratios of 10.

Jupiter attributes the gap to Ultra V3, which launched on October 17, 2025, and introduced several protective features. Private routing keeps transaction details hidden until execution, cutting off the information advantage that sandwich bots rely on. Dynamic slippage estimation adjusts tolerance levels in real time rather than relying on static user-set parameters. The platform also incorporated what it calls “Iris meta-aggregation” and “Ultra Signaling” to further enhance transaction privacy and execution quality.

The claimed results are aggressive: 34 times better sandwich protection than competitors, average positive slippage of +0.6 basis points, and execution fees that are 8 to 10 times lower than rival platforms.

Architecture matters more than the chain

One of the study’s more interesting conclusions is that the blockchain itself isn’t the only variable. Application-level choices — how a trading platform routes orders, what it exposes to the public mempool, how it handles slippage — play a decisive role in determining which users get attacked and how often.

That said, the researchers were clear that sandwich attacks haven’t been eliminated on Solana. Validators still represent a vector of exposure, and Jupiter Ultra reduces the problem but does not solve it.