The Jito Network: The MEV Frontier on Solana

Introduction: jm (not gm)

At the surface, the Jito Network is a suite of MEV-aware infrastructure. Underneath the surface, Jito’s technical architecture is deeply intertwined with Solana’s security, economics, and governance, making it a truly vital component of the chain’s nervous system. There are three core products: the Jito-Solana client, JitoSOL, and StakeNet. Tying all of them together, the Jito Network is frontrunning three of the biggest trends on Solana: MEV, LSTs, and coordination. 

Frankly, Jito is in a class of its own, but for the sake of comparison, a simplification of Jito on Ethereum is Flashbots + Titan x Lido. For context: Ethereum proposers realized approximately 308,649 ETH using MEV-Boost–an out-of-protocol MEV auction by Flashbots. Titan built 436,518 blocks, received 46,790 ETH in tips, and profited 6,755 ETH (since the merge according to libMEV). And Lido has $28.7B in TVL and generated 10,950 ETH in revenue YTD. Given Solana’s growth prospects, Jito very clearly has a bright future. 

Solana’s Inefficiencies and the Challenges of MEV

Unlike Ethereum, Solana does not have a mempool. Instead, block production is continuous, so the network is constantly receiving transactions, producing blocks, and propagating information. The high-performance standard makes operating a Solana node hardware and capital intensive relative to Ethereum. 

However, optimizing for performance means trading other important properties such as reliability. Due to the high growth of activity and demand for blocks on Solana, this trade-off exposes problems in QUIC–the current networking implementation–and the network delivered suboptimal UX to its users. There is a circular nature to these growing pains.

Solana’s biggest problem is spam. At a high level, the scheduler (Solana’s native block engine) does not properly prioritize transactions based on paid fees. In other words, paying a higher priority fee does not deterministically ensure inclusion in the block.