Say Goodbye to Sandwich Attacks: How frfr.fun's Private RPC Protects Small Traders

The dream of decentralised finance has always been a level playing field. Anyone with an internet connection accessing the same opportunities as a Wall Street hedge fund. But as the ecosystem matured, a predatory force emerged from the shadows of the mempool — and the numbers are staggering.

Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has become the invisible tax of blockchain trading. According to research published on SSRN, cumulative Ethereum MEV exceeded $1.38 billion through mid-2024. Sandwich attacks alone — the most brutal form of MEV targeting retail traders — accounted for $289.76 million, or over 51% of total MEV transaction volume in a single measurement period. On Solana, sandwich bots extracted between $370 million and $500 million over just 16 months ending May 2025.

For the average trader trying to catch the next opportunity on the Base network, this isn't an abstract statistic. It's money leaving your wallet before your transaction even clears.

This ends with frfr.fun.

The Invisible Predator: What is a Sandwich Attack?

To understand the solution, you need to understand the anatomy of the attack.

In a standard public blockchain environment, when you submit a trade, it enters the mempool — a public waiting room for pending transactions. Every transaction you send is broadcast to the entire network before it is confirmed. MEV bots scan this waiting room around the clock.

When a bot detects a retail buy order with a certain slippage tolerance, it executes a ruthlessly efficient three-step attack:

Step 1 — The Front-Run: The bot submits a buy order with a higher gas fee, ensuring it is processed immediately before yours. This pushes the token price up.

Step 2 — The Victim Trade: Your transaction executes at the now-inflated price. You receive fewer tokens than you expected.

Step 3 — The Back-Run: The bot immediately sells its newly acquired tokens at the higher price your buy order created, locking in a risk-free profit.

You start your position "underwater." The bot walks away with money it never earned.

This is not a rare edge case. Research tracking Ethereum from October 2022 to September 2024 found that sandwich attacks averaged more than 4,400 per day — more than one per block. In October 2024 alone, gas fees from sandwich attack back-run transactions totalled an estimated $7.89 million for that single month. A stark, real-world example from May 2025: one victim trading RATO tokens for 0.83 ETH received nearly 10 million fewer tokens than they would have without the front-run.

The attacks have no floor on size. In March 2025, a single MEV bot drained a Uniswap v3 USDC-USDT liquidity pool in under eight seconds, resulting in a trader losing over $215,000 on what should have been a near-zero-risk stablecoin swap.

Why Are Memecoin Traders Especially Vulnerable?

Memecoin traders are disproportionately targeted because they routinely set high slippage tolerances when trading illiquid or highly volatile assets. To a sandwich bot, high slippage is a wide-open door — it defines exactly how much of a price impact it can force on you and still have your trade execute.

Research confirms that during periods of peak volatility, the probability of sandwich victimisation rises by approximately 87% for memecoins, with adverse slippage quadrupling compared to normal conditions. The Base network, with its low transaction fees, makes running these attacks even cheaper for bots, compressing the cost-to-attack ratio to near zero.

The Scale of the Problem in 2025

The MEV landscape shifted in 2025 but did not disappear. Key data points from the most current research:

EigenPhi data covering November 2024 to October 2025 recorded over 95,000 sandwich attacks on Ethereum, resulting in approximately $60 million in annual losses for traders.
Monthly sandwich extraction peaked near $10 million in late 2024 before declining to roughly $2.5 million by October 2025 — not because attacks stopped, but because bot competition intensified and margins compressed.
A single entity known as "jaredfromsubway.eth" controlled approximately 70% of all Ethereum sandwich attacks throughout most of 2025, demonstrating how centralised and sophisticated this predator class has become.
On Solana, one sandwich program alone executed 1.55 million sandwich transactions over a single 30-day window, generating over $13 million in profit with an 88.9% success rate.

The threat is evolving, not fading. Researchers at ScienceDirect have documented that MEV attackers are growing increasingly sophisticated, combining sandwich attacks with arbitrage in coordinated chains to maximise extraction. The "invisible tax" per vulnerable trade ranges from 2 to 34 basis points — a hidden fee you never see on any receipt.

Enter the Private RPC: The frfr.fun Shield

The core reason sandwich attacks succeed is visibility. If a bot cannot see your transaction in the public mempool, it cannot attack it.

frfr.fun's Private RPC changes the routing of your trades entirely. Instead of broadcasting your intent to the entire network before confirmation, your transaction is sent through a secure, private channel directly to trusted block builders.

This is not a novel idea — it is the proven standard for professional trading desks. Since the introduction of private RPC infrastructure on Ethereum, approximately 80% of DeFi transactions now flow through private channels rather than the public mempool. The technology has been validated at scale; frfr.fun brings it natively to every retail trader on Base.

How It Works

When you trade on frfr.fun, your transaction bypasses the public waiting room entirely:

No Visibility — Bots cannot detect your trade before it is confirmed.
No Front-Running — With no signal in the public mempool, bots have no opportunity to jump the queue.
Guaranteed Execution — You receive the price displayed on your screen, not a price inflated by a bot milliseconds before your order lands.

The mechanics mirror what Flashbots Protect pioneered on Ethereum — a service that has protected over 27 million transactions by routing them directly to builders, away from the public mempool entirely.

Why This Matters Specifically for Base Network Traders

The Base network has become a primary destination for on-chain memecoin activity, driven by low fees and high throughput. But those same low fees that make Base accessible for retail traders also make it extremely cheap for MEV bots to operate. Every sandwich attack costs a bot less in gas, which means attacks are economically viable on even smaller trades.

Without a protection layer, the low-fee promise of Base is partially undermined by the hidden MEV tax. frfr.fun's integrated Private RPC closes this gap at the infrastructure level, so traders are not required to understand private RPCs, configure wallet settings manually, or hope they set slippage correctly.

Professional-Grade Security, Democratised

In the past, private RPCs and MEV protection were tools reserved for institutional desks and high-volume traders. Setting one up required technical knowledge — manually adding custom RPC endpoints to your wallet, understanding mempool mechanics, and knowing which block builders to trust.

frfr.fun removes every one of those barriers. When you connect your wallet and execute a swap, the secure routing is handled automatically at the backend. No configuration. No technical expertise required. A $50 trade receives the same infrastructure protection as a $50,000 trade.

This is what it means to build security as a right rather than a premium feature.

Beyond the Sandwich: The Full frfr.fun Security Approach

Private RPC routing is the headline protection, but the commitment to safe trading runs deeper:

Slippage Optimisation — The frfr.fun interface is designed to guide users toward efficient slippage settings, minimising the window that bots rely on to make attacks profitable in the first place.

Verified Launches — Every token launch goes through a transparent review process. Code and liquidity conditions are scrutinised before listing, addressing the rug-pull risk that compounds losses for retail traders even beyond MEV exposure.

Community-First Design — Every feature is evaluated against a single question: does this help the small trader? MEV protection is not a bolt-on. It is a core design principle.

The Bigger Picture: Why MEV Protection is a DeFi Equity Issue

The "invisible tax" framing of MEV is not just rhetorical. Research formalising the structural equivalence between MEV and payment for order flow (PFOF) in traditional finance concludes that MEV, unlike PFOF, provides no offsetting rebate to users — it is pure extraction with no return benefit to the person being exploited.

New entrants to crypto who lose money to sandwich bots rarely understand what happened. They see they received fewer tokens than the interface suggested, or their transaction cost more than expected, and they conclude that "DeFi is rigged." They are not entirely wrong about the diagnosis — but the cure exists. Building MEV protection into the core trading layer is how the industry earns back that trust.

How to Get Started on frfr.fun

No setup is required on your end.

Connect your wallet to frfr.fun. Find a project you want to trade. Execute your swap. The Private RPC routing operates invisibly in the background, ensuring your transaction reaches block builders through a private channel before any bot can see it.

The protection is automatic. The playing field is level. Your gains belong to you.

Conclusion: Take Back What's Yours

The data is unambiguous. Sandwich attacks cost retail traders tens of millions of dollars annually. The bots are sophisticated, centralised, and relentless. The public mempool is their hunting ground.

frfr.fun removes you from that hunting ground entirely.

As the Base network continues to grow into one of the most active destinations for on-chain trading, the question is not whether MEV protection matters — the $60 million in annual trader losses answers that. The question is whether you are trading on a platform that takes it seriously.

Trade with frfr.fun. Let the Private RPC do the heavy lifting. Keep what you earn.