THORChain’s Swap Queue Blocks Sandwich Attacks and Cuts MEV Costs for Traders

THORChain published a technical guide explaining how its execution model neutralizes sandwich attacks, one of the most common forms of maximum extractable value (MEV) in decentralized finance.

Between November 2024 and October 2025, this type of attack extracted approximately $60 million from Ethereum users across a volume of between 60,000 and 90,000 monthly incidents.

A sandwich attack occurs when a bot places one trade just before and another just after a user’s swap, capturing the price movement that the transaction itself generates. On networks like Ethereum, pending transactions are visible in the mempool before they are executed, allowing bots to pay higher gas fees to gain priority and exploit that window.

THORChain addresses the problem through the Advanced Swap Queue, which orders swaps by price impact, not by who pays more to execute first. Under this scheme, attacking a user requires committing more capital and paying higher fees, making the cost of the attack systematically exceed the value available to extract.

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