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Earlier this year, Solana Network congestion It created a lot of concern about traders' ability to conduct on-chain transactions.

Today, traders have a much easier time landing trades, but anxiety has returned to focusing on the prices they get while doing so.

On a large scale Sandwich attackswhere sophisticated traders exploit price differences at the expense of inexperienced traders, and it has proven to be a long-term and Difficult to solve problem. Swap app Solana and market infrastructure company DFlow brought an interesting new solution to the table when they proposed conditional liquidity, which tasks new market brokers with separating toxic order flow from non-toxic.

When a DEX trader attempts to swap one cryptocurrency for another, he is assigned a price and allowed to set slippage, which is the percentage by which the quoted price can change after an order is placed. Solana Sandwich attackers exploit slippage through initial transactions to artificially raise the price a few basis points before selling the asset immediately after making a profit – leaving the user with a worse price. Overall, sandwich attackers can do this Millions daily.

DFlow proposes adding a new category of market participants called splitters to separate toxic order flow from non-toxic ones and limit sandwich attack.

Slicers, which will initially be selected by DFlow, reside between users sending transactions and DEXs receiving them, essentially sorting good transactions from bad ones. When DEXs receive these classified transactions, they can then charge higher fees to the sandwiches and lower fees to everyone else.

Nitish Nath, founder of DFlow, said conditional liquidity “doesn’t completely solve the problem” but could reduce it by charging different rates. “The magnitude of the sandwich reduction is proportional to the difference in the higher rate of toxic flux and the lower rate of non-toxic flux.”

DFlow already Fired An aggregator called DFlow Aggregator and a conditional liquidity DEX platform called Clearpool.

The sharders aim to create an order flow market, where the better the prices the sharders achieve for users, the more orders will flow from the DEXs and wallets that send them. Splitters make money by collecting some of the price improvements they offer.

“Conditional liquidity aligns with the interests of retail traders, DEX exchanges and the network – a win-win for all parties involved. We expect conditional liquidity to be one of the big breakout trends for 2025,” said JR Reid, partner at DFlow investor Multicoin Capital.

Chris Chung, CEO of swap titan Solana, said he believes conditional liquidity could give honest traders better prices, but it may be difficult to convince DEXs to start accepting the new market structure. DX platforms will only start changing their fees if there is enough demand for conditional liquidity from the venues where traders place orders, but those venues will also want to see DX platforms integrate this feature first.

“It has become a chicken-and-egg problem,” Chung said in a text message, adding that the demand question may be partly why DFlow launched its own sector and DEX.

Nath told me that a “handful” of large wallets and apps have inquired about integrating conditional liquidity, though he declined to specify which ones.

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