Solana is one of the most extractive and predatory chains I know of.

And I'm not only talking about the PvP madness while trading memecoins, with players trying to rug pull each other before being rug pulled themselves.

I'm talking about Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)-abuse.

Which is validators intentionally extracting liquidity from users.

Due to its design, running a Solana validator node is extremely expensive and, usually, receiving the staking rewards through linear SOL issuance plus base fees is not enough to pay for the infrastructure costs.

To keep things going, some validators rely on The Solana Foundation Delegation Program. A subsidy paid by the Foundation to whitelisted validators, to help pay the costs and keep everything running.

Others, however, have developed MEV tactics.

Some with a (very) questionable morality, like the Sandwich Attacks, front running users' swaps, abusing of their privilege position as mempool runners, block builders and/or transaction proposers.

Solana also has a high ratio of failed transactions.

Each time a transaction fails, users need to pay the respective fees over and over again, because even failed transactions cost fees distributed to the validators who failed to do their job and validate these transactions.

Crazy, right? This design effectively encourages validators to fail into validating transactions as a MEV tactic, because it means more fees paid from the same users while trying to do some basic operations that would've worked flawlessly and inexpensively in most other chains.

And we are just scratching the surface here.

What other predatory and extractable activities you know from Solana?