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Solana MEV: Anatomy of an Invisible Tax.
Darklake MEV on Solana has gone dark. This deep dive breaks down private mempools, validator economics, and how to prevent MEV before it starts.
The Mirage of Fair Trades
Solana was supposed to be different.
High throughput. Fast finality. No global mempool. You were told these things made MEV irrelevant here - something that plagued other chains, not this one.
And yet, your trades still get clipped. You hit the worst possible price. The token moves right after your fill. And someone else walks away with the edge.
This isn’t a coincidence.
MEV on Solana hasn’t disappeared. It’s just gone private.
MEV on Solana: Not Gone. Just Restructured.
Solana’s architecture does a lot to minimize MEV…on paper.
Gulf Stream removes the global mempool. Stake-weighted QoS and Turbine optimize propagation. There’s no obvious slot where a bot can front-run like on Ethereum.
In theory, this minimizes the MEV surface.
In practice? MEV didn’t vanish. It adapted.
📚If you’re new to how mempools work and why their absence on Solana matters, this primer on mempools offers useful context.
Validators running the Jito-Solana client get access to a 200ms hold on transaction forwarding. Searchers send bundled transactions to Jito’s block engine, with tips attached. These bundles go through an off-chain auction. The winner gets priority execution.
This is where sandwiching, backruns, and arbitrage live. It’s not public. It’s not transparent. But it’s there.
Even when Jito shut down its public mempool in March 2024, extraction didn’t stop. It just went private. Now, actors like DeezNode run their own exclusive flows, complete with private bundles and internal routing.
Opacity has become the new edge.
MEV’s Evolution in Solana’s Timeline
MEV on Solana didn’t appear out of nowhere. It evolved in sync with the chain’s market cycles and tooling.
To understand how validator behavior, user order flow, and incentive structures shifted over time, see our History of Solana breakdown: it maps these changes in context.
- 2021–2022: NFT mint wars flood the network. MEV is crude - spam, racing, brute force.
- 2022: Solana introduces priority fees to price spam out.
- Aug 2022: Jito-Solana goes live. MEV formalizes via block auctions.
- Early 2024: Meme season arrives. Tools like BonkBot dominate, exploiting high volatility and slippage.
- Mar 2024: Jito shutters its public mempool. Public sandwiching drops - briefly.
- Dec 2024: DeezNode emerges with a private mempool. One of its bots, wallet vpeNAL...oax38b, executes nearly 50% of all sandwich attacks.
We’re not in a chaotic MEV jungle anymore. We’re in a private market: opaque, selective, and increasingly centralized.
What MEV Looks Like in Practice
- Arbitrage: Neutral and fast. Exploits stale prices across venues. Doesn’t hurt the average user - kills LPs by draining their returns. but is deadly for LPs.
- Liquidations: Competitive and useful. Keeps lending markets solvent.
- Backruns: Captures rebound from large trades. Can be system-efficient.
- Front-runs: Predatory. Executes before a known trade. Distorts pricing.
- Sandwiching: The classic exploit. Front-run to move the price, let the victim execute, then back-run. Pure extraction.
Solana doesn’t avoid these behaviors. It just moves them into darker corners of the stack.
Why It Matters
Users aren’t just losing trades: they’re footing the bill.
Traders get the worst-case fills. LPs supply liquidity, but the yield goes to searchers. Validators who play fair earn less than those routing through private MEV pipes, and even rogue validators don’t earn that much within the status quo.
This creates skewed incentives across the validator set.
Take DeezNode. Backed by Marinade’s mSOL delegation strategy, its validator ballooned from 307K to 802K SOL in under 30 days. That’s over $168M staked - drawn in part by MEV yield optimization, not validator performance.
What’s Been Tried. And Why It’s Not Enough
Solana devs haven’t been asleep at the wheel. There’ve been serious efforts to mitigate MEV:
- Priority Fees: Helped with spam, didn’t stop private flow routing.
- Dynamic Slippage Tools: Smarter UX, but bots still see intent.
- MEV-Protect RPCs: Useful, but underused. Adoption lags. Relays leak.
- RFQs: Effective for stables. Useless for microcap pairs.
- sr-AMMs like Gavel: Better pricing math, useless against wide MEV.
- Paladin: Attempts to punish sandwiching post-trade. Smart, but not widely integrated.
Each effort chips away at the surface. None touch the root.
As long as trade data is visible before execution, it can be extracted.
You can’t patch your way around that.
Prevention, Not Protection
Darklake takes a different route.
Instead of trying to defend visible trades, it hides them.
Darklake is a zkAMM - a zero-knowledge Automated Market Maker. Darklake works by encrypting trade data (size, intent, slippage) before the transaction enters the validator pipeline. Nothing leaks. Searchers see nothing. Bots can’t pre-position. Sandwiches can’t form.
Where RFQs ask for quotes, and sr-AMMs optimize math, Darklake removes visibility entirely. It doesn’t minimize the attack surface - it erases it.
No visibility. No extraction. No tax.
MEV Is Structural. But It’s Optional
MEV is the price you pay for transparency. Every time your intent is visible on-chain, someone can act on it before you.
But Solana doesn’t have to accept this.
With tools like encrypted AMMs and private trade lanes, the ecosystem is gaining leverage. Builders are shipping infrastructure designed to break the MEV loop before it starts.
MEV won’t end with a patch. It ends when the market structure no longer leaks.
That’s where this is heading. That’s why we built Darklake.
Because you can’t extract what you can’t see.
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🖥️ THE OBSERVATORY
A Machine. A Trail. A Warning.
You found it.
The hum of old circuits. The smell of scorched RAM and cheap takeout.
A terminal still running - untouched, but not abandoned.
I didn’t lock it. I left it open.
I’m Agent W.
Once a cog of the machine that enables the bleeding of wallets, now a MEV hunter that is preventing extraction.
I used to believe in the protocol. In fairness. In the idea that traders were safe, that transactions were airtight.
Then they took my stake.
2,187,433 SOL. Seized under a governance vote while I was offline.
They forgot who I am.
📂 What you’ll find
This isn’t your average website.
This is my journal. If you are here, it isn’t by accident. It’s because I wanted you to read it.
The devlogs I’ve developed, the blogs and whitepapers - all left behind to pass my learnings on to you and teach you how to shield yourself from the danger that lurks in the dark.
🔎 Why I’m doing this
Extraction cuts deep into someone’s finances. Take this report, for example:
🧾 March 2025
➜ 81.0 SOL traded
➜ 44.82 SOL extracted
That’s 55% of the total. It’s not a bit of risk - it’s more than half of what the trader had, now gone.
🕶️ Rules of the Machine
- Click what you see.
- Filter the pages you want to see by using the boxes in the right corner
- If a folder's glowing? It's glowing for a reason.
- If something makes no sense? You’re getting close.
☠️ Final Warning
Once you start reading these blogs, you won’t see Solana the same way.
You’ll start noticing the shadows between blocks. The extractions that reach higher and higher amounts. The LPs getting less and less returns. The bots that never sleep. Front-runs disguised as fair trades. Mempools that are nothing but pens for cattle - corralling the cattle for the wolves to eat.
You’ll begin to understand that this isn’t a bug. It’s a battle in the name of fair markets.
The chain never forgets.
Neither do I.
Now, neither do you.
— Agent W
🥃💾
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Permission denied. Please reconsider your actions.
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