How Solana is cutting MEV snipers out of token launches

Solana just flipped the script on MEV snipers—and token launches will never be the same.

The blockchain's new anti-frontrunning mechanism is surgically removing predatory trading bots from token launches, protecting retail investors from getting steamrolled by automated extractors.

How it works: Solana's updated transaction processing protocol prioritizes fairness over pure speed, effectively neutralizing MEV strategies that traditionally feast on new token releases.

No more gas wars, no more priority fee auctions—just a level playing field where actual humans stand a fighting chance against algorithmic predators.

This isn't just technical tweaking; it's a fundamental shift in how blockchain economics protect the little guy from Wall Street tactics—even if those tactics now wear crypto pajamas.

Because nothing says 'decentralized finance' like needing to outbid bots just to participate—unless you're on Solana, where the game just got fair.

Every single one of those tokens needs a way to facilitate price discovery, and the standard way today is the bonding curve, popularized by Pump.

The problems of bonding curves are well known. Though Solana doesn’t have a public mempool, transactions are observable in flight via RPC queues and bundle relays. This creates a race environment wherein sniper bots can frontrun trades by pre-positioning ahead of organic demand, or sandwich the trades by bidding higher priority fees.

Launching a token is easy in theory, but tricky in practice. Of late, Solana teams are coming up with a slew of token launch solutions to address these challenges.

Metaplex

Metaplex is a team popularly known for providing the key token infrastructure on Solana. In July, the team diversified from this Core product offering and launched the “Genesis” ICO launch platform.

To date, three projects have executed their token generation event with Genesis: DeFiTuna, Collector’s Crypt and Portals. Later today marks its fourth TGE launch with Exotic Markets, a relatively new DeFi options protocol that went live on July 30.

Exotic is launching its token with Metaplex’s new “Uniform Price Auctions” feature, meant to facilitate organic price discovery while deterring frontrunning and sniping.

The auctions work as such: Users place bids for how many tokens they’d like to buy and at what price. All bidders eventually pay at the same clearing price, defined as the lowest bidding price that fully sells the supply.

Because bids are evaluated only at the end of the auction, there is no benefit for a sniper to jump ahead with a higher priority fee — a sniper that submits a high last-minute bid shoots themselves in the foot.

“Everyone gets the same price. There’s no frontrunning, no sniping, cabals and bundling. We’re solving for the trust and transparency issues surrounding token launches by bringing everything onchain so there’s no inside group with an edge and the community gets a chance to participate at the earliest stages,” Metaplex co-founder Stephen Hess told me.

Heaven

Another player tackling fairer token launches is the Heaven memecoin launchpad. 

Heaven pairs its launchpad with a proprietary AMM DEX, listing tokens exclusively from the first second of trading. 

This vertical integration avoids the standard memecoin bonding curve and lets the team enforce anti-MEV protections during price discovery. At launch, the DEX says it applies a linearly decaying, six-second “sniper tax” to deter bots and last-second snipes.

Ellipsis’ Gavel

Like Heaven, Ellipsis’ Gavel follows a similar vertical integrated design by tying together the product of token distribution and a sandwich-resistant AMM. When tokens end their public sale, funds raised are migrated to Ellipsis’ AMM at the same opening price as the sale’s close to deter any post-sale sniping or arbitrage opportunities.

Meteora

Meteora lets teams launch tokens on pools using “anti-sniper” features like decaying fees (Fee Scheduler), size-based surcharges (Rate Limiter), and gated early-access deposits.

These features work together to penalize early bot bursts and outsized purchases, thereby reducing extractable alpha for snipers. It slows down the first blocks of price discovery and lets organic demand get in their buys before public pools open.

Orca

Finally, there is Orca’s Wavebreak memecoin launchpad. Wavebreak retains a bonding curve model but adds several safeguards. It employs an “anti-bot” system that includes an onchain CAPTCHA system to slow bots in the curve phase. 

While this design seems to improve fair access in the bonding phase for non-bot participants, it does not explicitly exclude automated bots and snipers.

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