In the past year, the memecoin craze has turned Solana into a gold mining mecca for traders. Countless people are chasing the skyrocketing Meme coins, trying to use Trading Bot to take advantage. But few people realize that the real huge profit business that is sure to make money does not jump on the K-line chart, but is hidden deep in the dark forest of the blockchain. This is MEV (Maximum Extractable Value). Unlike publicly visible Bot profits, MEV earnings are concealed within block building and ordering mechanisms, controlled by the “invisible hands” that hold power over the chain’s infrastructure.

Many people don’t know this because the operating threshold of this system is high, information is extremely asymmetric, and the controllers are extremely concentrated. When you use Bot to seize the market and prevent pinching, the MEV catcher controls the order of transactions behind the scenes and accurately captures the arbitrage opportunities. While small traders compete on speed and strategy, large institutions with staking advantages and node privileges leverage their structural advantages to sit comfortably at the top of the profit pyramid. On Solana, MEV isn’t just a trading opportunity - it’s infrastructure-level power, controlled by a select few, creating a game of high barriers, high monopoly, and high profits.

Today we will reveal the big business of MEV on Solana.

1. What is MEV?

MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) refers to the extra value that validators can extract by including, excluding, or reordering transactions when building blocks. Due to the Memecoin craze and active DeFi ecosystem, MEV has become a massive business. From an operational perspective, MEV typically includes three main types: liquidations, arbitrage, and sandwich attacks.

• Liquidation: These involve claiming rewards by liquidating lending positions near default. When borrowers fail to maintain the collateralization ratio required for the loan in the lending agreement, their positions will be eligible for liquidation. MEV searchers monitor these undercollateralized positions on the blockchain and execute liquidations by paying off some or all of the debt in exchange for a portion of the collateral as a reward.

• Arbitrage: This involves simultaneously buying and selling on different DEXs to profit from price differences. The simplest form of arbitrage is when two DEXs have different prices for the same trading pair, and the arbitrageur uses one trade to earn the difference.

• Sandwich Attack: This involves buying before a target transaction and selling afterward for profit. In DeFi markets, attackers execute three atomic bundled transactions: first, they front-run by pushing the asset price up to the victim’s maximum slippage tolerance, then the victim’s transaction executes at the higher price, further increasing it, and finally, the attacker back-runs by selling the asset at the inflated price, offsetting their initial cost and securing a profit.

From a behavioral perspective, MEV strategies are generally categorized as front-running and back-running:

• Front-running: This occurs when MEV searchers identify another trader’s buy or sell orders in the mempool and place identical orders before them, profiting from the price impact of the subsequent transaction.

• Back-running: This is the counterpart to front-running, a specific MEV strategy that capitalizes on temporary price imbalances caused by another transaction, often due to suboptimal routing. Once the user’s transaction is executed, back-runners trade the same asset to balance prices across liquidity pools and secure profits.

Liquidations and most arbitrage opportunities are back-runs, while sandwich attacks combine front-running and back-running. For detailed MEV examples, please refer to the Helius report, which provides comprehensive explanations and case studies.

2. How big is the MEV business?

According to some unverified statistics, last year trading bots earned $1.1 billion, pump schemes made $500 million, MEV extracted $1.5 billion, AMMs generated $1 billion, and Trump-related celebrity projects earned $500 million, with nearly $5 billion flowing to off-chain parties. On the Solana network, MEV profits have surged dramatically with increased network activity and the 2024 memecoin boom.

According to Helius’s report, Jito’s arbitrage detection algorithm analyzed all Solana transactions, including those outside Jito bundles, identifying 90,445,905 successful arbitrage trades over the past year. The average profit per arbitrage was $1.58, with the highest single arbitrage profit reaching $3.7 million. These arbitrage activities generated $142.8 million in profits, with $126.7 million (88.7%) denominated in SOL.

MEV is truly big business!

3. MEV on Solana is More Severe: Jito as the MEV King

MEV on Solana is more intense and centralized than MEV on ETH. This is due to the difference in the underlying design of their chains.

Solana’s architecture follows this path: High Performance → Sacrificed Decentralization → Higher Centralization → Concentrated Power.

While Solana is known for its high performance with 400ms block times (compared to Ethereum’s 12 seconds), this comes at the cost of decentralization. Unlike Ethereum, Solana lacks a mempool, requiring nodes to connect directly with the current block-producing validator to submit transactions and receive block data. This design grants enormous power to block-producing validators with little checks and balances, leading to severe MEV issues and monopolistic profits.

In contrast, Ethereum’s MEV market is more competitive. High competition between MEV searchers and block builders keeps overall MEV profits in check. Jito has emerged as Solana’s MEV powerhouse. After launching the Jito-Solana client in August 2022, adoption remained below 10% for the first nine months due to low network activity and limited MEV rewards. Adoption accelerated significantly from late 2023, reaching 50% by January 2024. By the end of 2024, over 94% of Solana validators (weighted by stake) were using the Jito-Solana client, establishing complete dominance.

How does Jito work?

The main difference between the Jito-Solana client and the official client is that it natively supports the MEV extraction mechanism, with its core functionality being the Bundles services. When validators run this client, they effectively join the Jito alliance. This alliance provides priority transaction execution channels, where traders can submit bundles by paying tips to gain transaction ordering advantages. As a result, the Jito client significantly increases node profitability compared to the official client.

Jito Bundles allow traders to prioritize and execute critical transactions by bundling them together and paying tips. This isn’t just for MEV opportunities - it’s also commonly used for transaction acceleration, batch transactions, and sandwich attack protection. Here’s how it works:

1. Transaction assembly: Traders discover arbitrage opportunities and quickly construct transactions.

2. Bundle submission:Transactions are packaged into bundles and sent to Jito nodes with tips to increase priority. These bundles are then forwarded to the block Leader.

3. Priority Execution: When a Jito validator becomes the current Slot Leader, they prioritize these transactions in the block and execute them in prime positions. The profits are distributed between validators and the Jito protocol. As mentioned earlier, Jito’s staking mechanism means that higher staked amounts on a Jito node result in more Tips and MEV income. To attract more SOL stakes, the Jito protocol allows users to stake and receive a share of both the node’s staking income and MEV earnings.

To further increase its node staking volume, Jito launched a staking protocol allowing regular users to delegate SOL to Jito nodes and share block rewards and MEV earnings proportionally. This creates a complete MEV ecosystem where stakers earn returns, nodes increase their block production probability, and traders get priority execution opportunities. MEV has three key characteristics: information advantage, monopolistic effects, and capital barriers.

MEV is an information war with winner-takes-all dynamics. On Solana, competing for MEV opportunities comes down to millisecond-level speed and on-chain information sensitivity. Whoever can discover arbitrage opportunities fastest and accurately submit transactions into the same/next Slot captures the profits.

This depends on two factors: fast information synchronization capability, usually requiring connection to large Jito nodes’ RPC services; and rapid transaction submission, preferably through Jito Bundles channels with sufficient Tips. Jito’s bundle service is inherently monopolistic. The key to MEV lies in “who is the block producer (Leader)”. For Jito to provide stable and reliable bundling services, it must cover as many Leader Slots as possible. This requires high client coverage across the network to ensure most rounds are produced by Jito nodes.

Once reaching the critical point, network effects become self-reinforcing: wider adoption leads to more stable services, making it harder for competitors to challenge. This explains how Jito quickly consolidated its 94% client share. Solana’s MEV is a capital game - as a PoS chain, more stake means higher probability of becoming Leader. Leaders have block ordering rights, naturally gaining the most MEV and Tips.

This creates high capital barriers: large nodes stake more, produce blocks more frequently, and sync information faster. The more sensitive the information, the stronger the arbitrage capability. RPC services from large nodes (even those in the same data center) become increasingly expensive, turning into scarce information entry points.

Those who can profit from MEV typically can only do so through the most well-capitalized large nodes.

4. Who Profits from Solana’s MEV?

As mentioned earlier, the MEV benefits on Solana are very impressive. So who do these proceeds ultimately go to? It mainly belongs to three core stakeholders: the Jito protocol itself, large-scale high-staking nodes, and block space sales brokers.

• Jito Protocol: As the infrastructure tax collector, Jito processed over 4.3 billion bundled transactions last year, generating user tips totaling 5.51 million SOL. At a SOL price of $140, this represents approximately $7.7 billion in additional on-chain transaction value through Jito’s infrastructure. With a 3-5% platform revenue share between Jito and validators, Jito’s direct earnings last year were approximately 200,000-270,000 SOL, or about $35 million.

• High-Stake Nodes: These privileged on-chain entities benefit from Solana’s PoS nature, where higher staked amounts mean higher block production probability. These “leading validators” not only receive base block rewards and inflation earnings but also collect substantial transaction tips from Jito Bundles. While normal nodes earn around 6% annually, some nodes can achieve over 20% APY during high network activity, far exceeding regular nodes. Their income sources include inflation rewards, block rewards, Jito Tips, and earnings from selling SWQoS transaction priority rights.

• Block Space Brokers: These intermediaries act as secondary market dealers for block space. They operate by partnering with high-stake nodes to purchase SWQoS transaction priority rights at favorable market prices. (Stake-Weighted Quality of Service, or SWQoS, allows leaders to identify and prioritize transactions from staked validators

During network congestion, SWQoS ensures that transactions from high-stake validators are less likely to be delayed or dropped.) These brokers bundle multiple user transactions into Jito Bundles, increase tips for higher priority, and profit from the spread between user-paid tips and validator payments. They also embed their own arbitrage trades (like backruns) in the bundles to capture additional MEV profits. For example, bloXroute’s tip earnings visible on DefiLlama are quite substantial, though this data doesn’t include all payment addresses or account for distributions to validators and order flow providers.

In summary, Solana shows a highly concentrated power structure, with Jito’s MEV profits largely captured by the Jito protocol, major validator nodes, and block space brokers.

5. Solana’s Client Competitive Landscape

Currently, Solana has over 1,300 validator nodes, with more than 94% running Jito nodes. The main client types include:

• Basic Solana Node: This is the most basic node client without any MEV optimization mechanisms. Nodes running this client have been largely marginalized due to significantly lower earnings compared to Jito nodes.

• Jito Node: The Jito client builds upon the official client by adding Jito protocol and Bundles support, allowing nodes to accept bundled transactions and collect tips. Users can submit transactions through Jito Bundle services for frontrunning, sandwich attack protection, and faster transaction processing by paying tips for higher execution priority. Since running Jito client nodes generates additional tip revenue, over 90% of mainnet nodes have switched to Jito nodes, making it the default choice.

• Paladin Node: Paladin is an improved version of the Jito client, aiming to provide a fairer transaction priority mechanism. It primarily addresses the “sandwich attack” issue in Jito’s bundle ordering (where malicious validators can insert sandwich transactions without penalty). According to community reports, Paladin client adoption is around 15%, and since it’s still recognized as a Jito client by the network, it’s included in the 94% total statistics.

• Firedancer Node: Developed by Jump Crypto, Firedancer is an independently implemented high-performance Solana client designed to improve network throughput, facilitating Jump’s quantitative trading. The initial version didn’t support the Jito protocol, thus couldn’t access Tips revenue, resulting in very low mainnet adoption. However, with new versions becoming Jito protocol compatible, validators using Firedancer can now earn Jito Tips income. While current mainnet deployment is limited, most testnet nodes have adopted Firedancer, suggesting potential for greater mainnet market share in the future. The Solana Foundation has also shown support for this client.

Competition logic for these node clients:

Jito VS Paladin: The battle for fairness. Due to its high degree of centralization, the Jito protocol has formed a de facto monopoly on MEV extraction. However, the protocol currently lacks a punishment mechanism for evildoers (such as validator sandwich attacks), resulting in users who even use bundles may still be trapped. This just gives clients like Paladin the opportunity to provide a fairer transaction first-on-chain bidding process. However, since Paladin is essentially a modified version of Jito-solana, if Jito improves its mechanisms in the future, it could potentially squeeze Paladin’s survival space.

Firedancer VS Other Clients: The Performance Evolution Firedancer’s main advantage is performance, claiming 1 million TPS (theoretical, actual effects unverified). If Solana’s network transaction volume continues to grow, high-performance client nodes meeting these requirements will gain advantages and pressure low-performance clients. Once high-performance nodes start packaging larger blocks, low-performance clients might fall behind in synchronization, affecting validation performance and eventually becoming marginalized. Therefore, as Solana’s TPS demands increase, it will naturally drive the entire network to migrate toward high-performance clients.

In summary: The vast majority of Solana mainnet nodes run the Jito-Solana client, with the Jito protocol becoming part of the infrastructure. As the Firedancer client begins to support the Jito protocol, the mainnet may see an evolution in client performance - moving from “running Jito to earn more” to “running high-performance Jito to survive.”

6. How Are Large Institutions Becoming Power Players in Solana’s MEV?

Solana’s architecture naturally tends toward power centralization, creating fertile ground for large institutions to enter and dominate the ecosystem. Organizations like Solana Foundation, Jito, Multicoin, Jump, Helius, Coinbase, Binance, and Jupiter all wield significant governance power on Solana. Many institutions see Solana’s future potential and aim to become key players in its MEV landscape. Let’s examine Sol Strategies’ recent moves as an example of how large institutions systematically establish themselves as power players:

Step 1: Sol Strategies expanded its market share and ecosystem control by acquiring nodes to become a major player. With Solana’s current staking rate at 65.6% (approximately 380 million SOL staked), controlling validator nodes means controlling network consensus and voting power. Sol Strategies rapidly entered this power structure through major node acquisitions:

2024.11: Acquired Cogent Crypto, a validator node operator for Solana, Sui, Monad, and ARCH networks, for $18 million (cash + stock), focusing primarily on the SOL network. March 2025: Purchased leading Solana validator nodes Laine and Stakewiz.com for 35 million CAD (cash + equity), increasing staked SOL to 3.3 million (worth approximately $388 million), and brought on Laine founder Michael Hubbard as Chief Strategy Officer.

Step 2: Attempted to consolidate power through inflation rate adjustment proposal SIMD-228 (which ultimately failed). Sol Strategies pushed for SIMD-228, a proposal to replace the current fixed deflationary model with a dynamic inflation mechanism. If passed, it would have reduced Solana’s annual inflation rate from 4.68% to as low as 1% or 0%. Though unsuccessful, the strategic intent was clear:

Stabilize SOL value: Lower inflation would reduce new SOL issuance, ease token selling pressure, and improve long-term staking returns. Squeeze out smaller nodes while strengthening large node dominance: Lower inflation would reduce all validator earnings, but smaller nodes with less risk tolerance would be more likely to fail, promoting network centralization toward top validators.

Step 3: Positioning in Solana’s financial ecosystem. Advancing Solana ETF listings, institutionalizing crypto assets, and becoming an ETF staking provider. Sol Strategies became the staking provider for 3iQ Solana Staking ETF and is pushing for its listing. This aims to further increase staking volume and compete for blockchain governance control.

Summary:

MEV is a big business, particularly on Solana where it generates substantial profits. MEV protocols like Jito operate as monopolies with strong network effects. Power on Solana is highly centralized, with MEV profits primarily captured by three players: the Jito protocol, high-stake validator nodes, and block space brokers. While multiple clients exist on the Solana network, Jito-Solana client currently dominates the mainnet, though Firedancer client (which supports the Jito protocol) could become the high-performance successor in the future. Solana’s structure is well-suited for institutional control, as demonstrated by SOL Strategies’ comprehensive approach to gaining influence through node acquisitions, governance proposal attempts, and ETF listing initiatives - showing how institutions can penetrate Solana’s technical, governance, and financial layers to compete for blockchain sovereignty.

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