Establish whether Tron sandwich attacks exploit latency races

Establish whether the sandwich attacks observed against Tron’s first-come-first-served transaction ordering are produced by attackers winning latency races to block producers after observing pending victim transactions.

Background

Tron exposes transactions through a public mempool but intends to prevent fee-based priority manipulation through first-come-first-served ordering. The paper observes persistent, highly profitable sandwich bots despite this protection.

The authors propose that attackers may monitor pending transactions through Tron’s pending-transaction endpoint, submit front-running transactions immediately, and compete with victims in a latency race to the block producer. The available on-chain data, however, cannot directly verify that this mechanism explains the observed attacks.