Three features do most of the work on Solana meme coins. Everything else in a feature list is secondary to how these behave.
Here is what each one actually does and how to judge it.
Jito routing and the problem it solves
Your pending transaction is information. On a public path, anyone watching can see a buy about to land, buy ahead of it, and sell into the price your order creates.
You experience this as a fill worse than the price you saw, and most traders attribute it to volatility.
Anti-MEV protection is on by default in Banana Gun, including Jito routing on Solana. The extraction becomes much harder when the transaction is not sitting in public view first.
This is one of the few losses in trading that a setting genuinely removes rather than reduces.
Why default matters more than presence
A protection you have to enable is a protection you will forget on the trade that mattered.
Check whether a candidate treats anti-MEV as a toggle or as the standing configuration. That difference shows up in every fill.
Copy Trade, and the controls that make it usable
Mirroring a wallet without limits means inheriting their sizing along with their ideas.
Banana Gun’s Copy Trade includes Buy Fixed, which sets a constant amount per mirrored trade regardless of what the wallet stakes.
Minimum and maximum market cap filters keep mirrors inside a band you chose. On Solana this matters more than on most chains, because the gap between a bonding curve token and a migrated one is enormous, and a wallet trading both will drag you across it.
Buy Only Once blocks repeat entries on the same token for seven days, which prevents a wallet averaging down into a failing position from taking you with it.
The check that comes before all of it
Honeypot detection runs by default, simulating the sell before your buy and blocking contracts that cannot be sold.
Anti-Rug and Anti-Rug GWEI carry a documented success rate of 80 to 85 percent according to Banana Gun. That leaves a genuine minority of cases, which is what position sizing is for.
What migration does to every feature above
Solana tokens frequently launch on a bonding curve and graduate to a real pool later.
Before migration there is no order book, so depth checks do not apply in the usual sense and the main risk is concentration.
After migration there is a book, and everyone who bought on the curve is now holding a position with somewhere to sell it. Volume spikes and so does volatility.
Your filters need to know which side of that line a token sits on, because the same settings produce very different outcomes either side of it.
Slippage behaves differently here
Solana transaction failures are cheap, which changes the correct setting.
On Ethereum people raise tolerance to avoid wasting gas. On Solana that pressure barely exists, so keep it tight and let trades fail.
A tight tolerance failing twice costs almost nothing. A loose one filling badly on a thin pool costs real money.
Priority fees, the variable most people ignore
During a heavily traded launch, a transaction sent without adequate priority may not land at all.
That applies to exits as well, and it matters more there. A sell that fails during a sharp reversal is not a minor inconvenience.
Exits deserve the same scrutiny as entries
Most evaluation focuses on getting in. Getting out is where Solana punishes people.
A sell that fails during a sharp reversal costs more than a missed entry ever will, and it happens under exactly the conditions where everyone is trying to sell at once.
Check that whatever you use handles exits with the same priority settings and protections as entries. Some tools treat the sell as an afterthought.
What none of this covers
Timing. Every feature above protects you from hostile contracts and poor execution.
None of them prevents buying a legitimate token at the wrong point in its cycle, which is how most money is actually lost on Solana.
Wallet selection beats feature selection
Once copy trading has proper controls, the controls stop being the variable. Who you follow becomes the variable.
A leaderboard rewards recent results, and recent results on Solana are heavily influenced by whoever happened to be positioned when a particular narrative ran.
Watch a wallet before mirroring it. Look at whether the wins come from many small correct calls or one enormous one, because those demand completely different sizing from you.
How to compare candidates properly
Confirm anti-MEV runs by default. Confirm copy trading has size and market cap controls. Confirm honeypot checks are automatic.
Then trade small across both quiet and busy periods and log your fills. Behaviour under load is the thing no comparison table measures and the thing that decides your worst day.
For a fuller explanation of how sandwich attacks work and what blocks them, this piece covers the mechanics.
You can set up Banana Gun on Solana here with anti-MEV routing on from the first trade.
