Slippage
When you swap, the price moves between your click and the execution, because others are trading too and because your own order moves a thin pool. Slippage tolerance is the maximum deviation you accept before the transaction fails instead. Set it at 1 percent and your buy in a fast launch will fail repeatedly. Set it at 30 percent and you are telling every bot exactly how much it can take from you.
- Calm coin, deep pool: 1 to 3 percent is plenty.
- Active coin, medium pool: 5 to 10 percent.
- Fresh launch: 15 to 20 percent, and a small size. Anything above is paying for the privilege of being sandwiched.
Priority fees
Solana is fast, but during a hot launch thousands of transactions compete for the same block. A priority fee is a tip to validators to include yours first. Wallets offer "fast" and "turbo" presets; some tools let you set it manually. In quiet markets the default is fine. In a launch, the fee is often the difference between buying at the price you saw and buying at the price the bots left you.
Sandwich bots
A sandwich bot sees your pending buy, buys the same coin one slot before you so the price rises, lets your order fill at the worse price, then sells right after. It earns exactly what your slippage allowed. The defence is boring: lower slippage, smaller orders, and using a wallet or aggregator with MEV protection turned on.
- 1–3%
- slippage for a normal swap
- ≤20%
- even in a launch
- 0
- sandwich bots that ignore high slippage