MEV on Solana is the profit that comes from choosing the order transactions run in. Because Solana has no public mempool, most of that ordering money flows through Jito, an auction where traders tip validators for placement. Those tips then feed staking yield, so the machinery that can worsen your swap price also pays stakers.
The scale makes it personal. The Jito software now runs under more than nine-tenths of all staked SOL, so nearly every block you touch was assembled by its auction. That puts one person on both sides of the same ledger. Swap $1,000 of SOL and ordering pressure can shave a few dollars off your fill. The same $1,000 sitting in a stake account quietly collects a slice of the tips that pressure generates. Where those tips sit inside the full yield picture is mapped in where staking yield comes from; this page explains the machine that produces them.
You are already standing on both sides of this trade, so it pays to know which side is which.
Solana has no public mempool, and that changes the game
Solana never built a public waiting room for transactions. Instead of sitting in an open mempool where anyone can read them, transactions stream straight to the validator scheduled to produce the next block. There is no shared pool to snoop on, so the classic style of front-running has nowhere to start.
On most older chains, a pending trade is public gossip. Ethereum transactions wait roughly twelve seconds in a mempool that anyone can watch, and bots read that queue the way a card shark reads a table. Solana works more like a drive-through than a waiting room. The network publishes a schedule of upcoming block producers in advance, and your wallet forwards the transaction directly to the current one. Blocks arrive about every 400 milliseconds. The pipeline that makes that possible is covered in how Solana processes transactions, and the clock behind the schedule is explained in Solana's timekeeping trick.
Here is the honest catch: removing the public queue did not remove the profit motive. It just moved the competition somewhere else.
| Solana | Ethereum | |
|---|---|---|
| Pending transactions | Streamed straight to the scheduled leader | Wait in a public mempool |
| Block time | ~400 milliseconds | ~12 seconds |
| Who orders the block | The leader for that slot | Builders and proposers in a separate market |
| Main MEV pipe | Jito's block engine auction | MEV-Boost relays |
Whoever produces the next block still decides what runs first, and being first is still worth money (source: Helius' introduction to Solana MEV). With no public pool to fight over, that competition needed a formal marketplace. Jito built it.
The Jito block engine: an auction for the front of the line
Jito is two things working together: a modified validator client that most of the network runs, and an off-chain auction called the block engine. Traders submit bundles of up to five transactions plus a tip in SOL. Every 50 milliseconds, the auction ranks bids and the winners land at the front of the block.
The bidders are called searchers, and they hunt three main kinds of prize. Arbitrage closes price gaps, for example buying a token where it trades at $1.00 and selling it where it trades at $1.02. Liquidations claim the bounties lending protocols pay for closing underwater loans. Sandwiching, the predatory third kind, gets its own section later. A bundle executes atomically, meaning all five transactions land in sequence or none do, which lets a searcher bet on an exact ordering without the risk of a half-finished trade. The minimum tip is 1,000 lamports, a fraction of a cent, but real auctions run far hotter (source: Jito Labs' low-latency transaction docs).
Walk one hypothetical bundle through the machine. A searcher spots that $10,000 of SOL buys a token slightly cheaper on one exchange than it sells for on another, a gap worth $80. They package the buy and the sell as one atomic bundle and bid a $30 tip to guarantee first position. If a rival bids $40, the rival wins the spot and the profit; if our searcher wins, the validator pockets the tip and the searcher keeps $50. Multiply that race across every price wobble on the chain and tips become an industrial income stream. Single tips have reached 890 SOL, and by late 2024 the client collecting them already ran under 92% of all staked SOL (source: CoinMetrics' State of the Network issue 288). The share has only climbed since, sitting above 90% of stake through mid-2026 alongside newer validator clients like the Firedancer client (source: Chainstack's 2026 Jito guide).
A tip, then, is real money changing hands for position. Before following where it flows, it helps to separate it from a fee you already pay.
A Jito tip is not a priority fee
A priority fee and a Jito tip buy different things. The priority fee is part of Solana's own fee system and pays the block producer to include your transaction. A Jito tip is an auction bid that buys a specific position, and unlike a priority fee, part of it can flow onward to stakers.
Every Solana transaction pays a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, half of which is burned and half paid to the block producer (source: Solana's fee structure documentation). When the network is busy you add a priority fee on top, which since a February 2025 protocol change goes entirely to the block producer. Both are covered in detail in Blofin's guide to base and priority fees. The Jito tip is the third stream, and it lives outside the protocol entirely: it is paid to a designated tip account as an auction bid, not a network fee.
| Money stream | What it buys | Who ends up with it | Can it reach your stake account? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base fee | Getting processed at all | 50% burned, 50% to the block producer | No |
| Priority fee | Faster inclusion when busy | 100% to the block producer | No |
| Jito tip | A guaranteed position in the block | Validator, shared with its delegators | Yes, minus a commission |
The last column is the one that matters for the rest of this article. Base fees and priority fees stop at the validator. Tips keep moving.
How tip money becomes staking yield
Tips reach stakers through the validators that collect them. A validator running the Jito client receives tip money for the blocks it produces, keeps a separate MEV commission, and passes the rest to everyone delegated to it. Liquid staking tokens such as jitoSOL wrap that same stream, which is why their quoted yields run higher.
Follow $1,000 of staked SOL through a busy week. Your validator wins its share of blocks, and the bundles inside them carry tips. The validator takes its MEV commission off the top. That cut is set separately from the advertised staking commission and is often much larger. The remainder is spread across its delegators by stake weight. Your slice might be a few cents in a quiet week or noticeably more during a memecoin frenzy. Over a year, tips have historically added a variable margin measured in fractions of a percentage point on top of the base inflation yield. Sharp spikes come when on-chain trading gets frantic. The base yield itself, currently in the rough range of 5.5-6.5% net, follows a schedule. The tip stream follows nothing but market chaos. That is exactly why no honest dashboard quotes tips as a fixed number.
This is also the story behind jitoSOL. Jito's liquid staking token routes stake to tip-earning validators and folds the proceeds into the token's value, and it grew into the largest Solana LST on that pitch. The token-by-token comparison, including how jitoSOL stacks up against its rivals, lives in the main Solana LSTs. If you delegate natively instead, the practical steps are in staking SOL step by step. The one MEV-specific habit worth adding: check a validator's MEV commission alongside its advertised one before delegating.
That is the pleasant side of the ledger. The other side shows up the moment you trade.
What MEV means when you actually swap
For a normal user, MEV mostly shows up as a swap that fills slightly worse than quoted. The most predatory form, the sandwich attack, became structurally harder after Jito shut down its mempool in March 2024, but it is not extinct. Your levers are a tight slippage cap, sane priority fees, and protected routes.
A sandwich attack brackets your trade. A bot buys just before you, lets your purchase push the price up, and sells right after. It pockets the difference while you eat a worse fill. Solana's missing public mempool makes this harder than on Ethereum, but for a while Jito itself ran an off-protocol pseudo-mempool that let searchers see pending bundles, and sandwiching flourished there. Jito Labs suspended that mempool on March 8, 2024, deliberately giving up fee revenue because the attacks were hurting ordinary users (source: CoinDesk's report on Jito ending its mempool). The move removed the easiest path, not every path. Private transaction feeds and a minority of unscrupulous operators still exist, so treat sandwich risk as reduced, never zero. The full defensive playbook, on any chain, is covered in MEV protection for traders.
For everyday Solana swaps, five habits cover most of the ground:
- Set a tight slippage cap on liquid pairs, 0.1-0.5%, so a manipulated price kills the trade instead of filling it.
- Split unusually large swaps into smaller pieces; big orders move prices and attract attention.
- Pay a modest priority fee in congestion rather than raising slippage; speed protects you, looseness exposes you.
- Use an aggregator's protections when swapping on Jupiter or elsewhere, since routing engines already shop across pools for the best fill.
- Review the fill afterward; a consistent gap between quote and execution is a signal to tighten settings.
From Blofin's operational perspective, trades on the exchange itself never touch this machinery, because our matching engine settles orders off-chain where there is no block auction to lose. The moment users withdraw SOL to self-custody and swap on-chain is the moment MEV starts applying to them, and knowing that boundary matters more than memorizing any single defense. If you have not reached that boundary yet, start from what Solana is and work forward; the auction will still be running when you arrive.
Frequently asked questions
Do I earn MEV tips if I stake SOL natively?
Only if your validator runs the Jito client and shares tips with delegators. Most stake does run it, but the sharing terms vary: the MEV commission is set separately from the advertised staking commission and can be far higher. Before delegating, check both numbers on a validator dashboard. A validator advertising 0% commission while keeping most tips can pay you less than one charging 5% and passing tips through.
Are jitoSOL and JTO the same thing?
No. jitoSOL is a liquid staking token: deposit SOL into Jito's stake pool and you receive jitoSOL, whose value grows with staking rewards plus shared MEV tips. JTO is a separate governance token that votes on how the Jito system is run and carries no staking yield by itself. Owning one gives you nothing of the other, and their prices move for different reasons.
Is MEV on Solana illegal or a scam?
Neither, in itself. Most MEV is market plumbing: arbitrage keeps prices consistent across exchanges, and liquidations keep lending protocols solvent. The predatory subset is sandwiching, which profits by making your trade fill worse. No regulator has banned MEV, and on a public blockchain no one can. The practical stance is to treat it as a market condition you manage, not a fraud you report.
How big can Jito tips get?
The floor is tiny, 1,000 lamports, which is a fraction of a cent. The ceiling is set by whatever the position is worth, and during frenzied moments it gets extreme. Single tips have reached 890 SOL. Validators collectively earned millions of dollars in tips in single weeks during the 2024 memecoin boom. In quiet markets, tips shrink to a trickle. There is no schedule and no average worth relying on.
Can I avoid MEV completely?
Not on a public chain, because someone always orders the transactions and ordering always has value. What you can do is cap your exposure: tight slippage limits, split orders, priority fees during congestion, and swap interfaces with built-in protections. Stakers, meanwhile, are on the receiving side of the same flow, so a portion of what traders pay in tips comes back to anyone delegated to a tip-sharing validator.
Researched and written by the Blofin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. Primary sources include Jito Labs' low-latency transaction docs, Solana's fee structure documentation, Helius' introduction to Solana MEV, CoinDesk's report on Jito ending its mempool, CoinMetrics' State of the Network issue 288, and Chainstack's 2026 Jito guide. All facts independently verified against cited documentation current as of July 2026.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment guidance, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any digital asset. Cryptocurrency markets involve significant risk and you should conduct your own research and consult qualified professionals before making investment decisions. Blofin Academy content reflects the state of public information at time of publication; protocol parameters, fees, and ecosystem data change frequently.