Infrastructure & Retail Catalyst

The convergence of high-throughput infrastructure, validator-side auction mechanisms like Jito’s block engine, and a surge in retail activity during the late 2023 memecoin cycle, brought MEV to the forefront of network design. Sophisticated searchers are now systematically capturing value through sandwiching, backrunning, and cross-DEX arbitrage, often extracting it directly from users or passive LPs.

Protocol & Validator Centrality

These behaviors are now not only more visible, but central to how protocols route flow, how validators optimize revenue, and how capital moves across Solana’s execution layer.

Current MEV Dynamics and Growing Opacity

MEV on Solana is defined by a set of increasingly visible and economically significant dynamics. Over 90% of staked validators now run the Jito-Solana client, enabling priority fee auctions that facilitate the inclusion of searcher-submitted bundles.

In Q2 2025 alone, all forms of MEV tips paid through Jito exceeded 400,000 SOL, with top validators earning over 500 SOL per day from bundle inclusion.

As this market has matured, public mempool visibility has declined sharply, following Jito’s deprecation of its public mempool in early 2024, and has been replaced by private relays and direct RPC submission paths. This opacity has made MEV harder to measure, even as its impact on users has intensified.

In March 2025, over 47% of all sandwich attacks on Solana targeted retail tokens, resulting in an estimated 65,000 SOL in extracted value in that month alone.

Meanwhile, DEX arbitrage and backrunning strategies have scaled significantly, capitalizing on price dislocations between venues like Orca, Phoenix, and Lifinity. These behaviors are now shaping validator economics, displacing passive LPs, and introducing new coordination challenges for protocols seeking to preserve execution fairness.

‍

MEV on Solana is not abstract. It manifests in specific, measurable ways that affect users, protocols, and infrastructure. The mechanics of searcher arbitrage, priority fees, and order flow routing reshape incentives across the stack, often concentrating value in ways that create hidden costs for other participants.

The following breakdown highlights how MEV is currently impacting three core actors in Solana’s economy: traders, liquidity providers, and validators.

‍

Why retail is targeted: Retail traders are the primary source of MEV extraction on Solana today. They bring flow that is often poorly routed, high-slippage, and latency-exposed, making their execution predictable and easy to exploit.

Sandwiching (front-run + back-run): The most common form of this is sandwiching: an attacker identifies a swap with generous slippage, inserts their own trade just before (front-run), and exits immediately after (back-run), profiting from the user’s price impact. The trader receives worse pricing, the attacker locks in arbitrage, and the validator collects a tip for including the bundle.

Fast markets, fragmented liquidity: This pattern is particularly prevalent in fast-moving or illiquid markets, exactly where traders are most vulnerable and least likely to notice small distortions. The explosion of Telegram trading bots made attacks even easier: bots auto-execute large slippage trades, effectively inviting MEV. On Solana, where swaps can settle in milliseconds and liquidity is fragmented across multiple venues, even short-lived price movements can be targeted. Unlike Ethereum, these attacks don’t leave easily traceable on-chain patterns, making the losses harder to audit and nearly impossible for the average user to detect.

Systemic Consequences:

• Pricing integrity degrades: MEV distorts price discovery at the margin, especially during periods of volatility.
• Effective slippage increases: Traders set a 1–5% tolerance but often experience worse pricing, even when pools appear to have sufficient depth.
• User trust erodes silently: Without visible reverts or clear loss markers, most users attribute poor execution to “normal volatility” rather than structural extraction.

Over time, this dynamic shifts value capture from end users to intermediaries (namely searchers and validators) while protocols unintentionally facilitate it through standard routing paths.

The Real Impact: In March 2025 alone, Solana recorded millions of lamports stolen via sandwich attacks, primarily on BONK, WEN, and SLERF pools. One address, Ghostyz1...bzFD, executed an astonishing 9,800+ sandwich attacks, mostly against retail flow on Jupiter. Nearly half of all sandwich attacks that month were attributable to this one address, which extracted ~65,200 SOL in aggregate profit, largely through predictable order flow.

‍

‍

A trader submits a 6,000 USDC swap for $PepeSol via Jupiter, using the default 15% slippage cap. A searcher, monitoring private mempool relays, detects the intent in-flight and quickly pre-buys $PepeSol, driving the price up by 11%. The trader’s order then executes at the top of this inflated curve, filling at a significantly worse rate.

Immediately after, the searcher back-runs the trade by selling back into the pool at the new elevated price, locking in profit. In total, the trader ends up paying 8.1% above fair market value, losing approximately 440 USDC in output. The searcher captures the spread, the validator collects a tip, and the transaction settles without revert. Therefore, it’s “successful” on-chain, but economically extractive in practice.

‍

For everyday traders, the result is subtle but painful: worse pricing, higher failure rates, and silent value leakage to actors they’ll never see.

‍

Liquidity providers on Solana play a foundational role in enabling token swaps, but in today’s MEV landscape, they increasingly absorb risk without capturing corresponding returns. LPs supply capital to facilitate trading, exposing themselves to price volatility, impermanent loss, and adverse selection in exchange for a share of swap fees. However, much of the spread they help create is being extracted by off-path actors.

DEX arbitrage extracts surplus: The most common mechanism is DEX arbitrage, where MEV searchers monitor for price discrepancies between pools and venues, then execute atomic swaps to lock in profit. These trades rely on LP-provided depth to succeed, but extract value without contributing liquidity or absorbing inventory exposure.

Case data (Phoenix ↔ Orca): In March 2025, Jito Explorer data showed that searchers executing arbitrage between Phoenix and Orca earned 2.9× more profit per trade than the LPs on either side of the transaction. In effect, LPs supplied capital and absorbed slippage, while the execution edge, and majority of economic surplus, went to MEV bots operating faster and off-route.

A study of the SLERF/SOL Orca pool in March 2025 showed that:

• MEV bots executed 47,000+ arbitrage trades
• LPs earned ~0.2 SOL per 1,000 SOL in TVL
• MEV bots earned 0.6 SOL per 1,000 SOL in arbitrage profit, over 3× more

Example Flow:
A user initiates a 1,000 USDC swap for BONK via Jupiter, routed through Orca.

• A searcher detects a price delta with Phoenix and executes a backrun to arbitrage the spread.
• The searcher captures $28 in profit. Orca LPs collect $9.30 in fees, Phoenix LPs earn $4.20.

Outcome: LPs earn a combined $13.50, while the searcher earns more than double, without posting capital or bearing any exposure. The liquidity infrastructure absorbs volatility; the arbitrage layer captures the reward.

As MEV revenue has grown, it has redefined the validator landscape, therefore shifting competition from uptime and fee structure to bundle flow access and relayer relationships. With the rise of Jito’s block engine, validators can now monetize blockspace directly by auctioning off transaction ordering rights to the highest bidder.

The result is a sharp divergence in earnings between MEV-participating validators and those operating under a “vanilla” configuration. As of mid-2025, over 90% of Solana stake is delegated to validators running Jito, and many top validators earn several hundred SOL per day in priority fees. These fees often exceed their base staking rewards.

Incentive realignment & ethics: This new revenue stream has introduced a powerful incentive realignment: validators are no longer just securing the network; they are active participants in the extraction of value. While this drives competitive returns and improves yield for delegators, it also introduces second-order effects that pressure decentralization and inclusion fairness.

First, coordination is becoming exclusive. Searchers increasingly prefer to route bundles through a small number of performant relayers and private channels. These relationships offer faster inclusion, tighter latency guarantees, and, in some cases, preferential treatment. Validators who operate outside of this flow see reduced bundle volume and lower tip revenue, regardless of technical uptime or stake performance.

Second, the ethical line is blurry. Some validators actively filter toxic bundles (e.g. those containing sandwiches or reordering attacks), while others accept all flow indiscriminately. Yet from the perspective of yield-maximizing delegators, the validator that accepts toxic flow may appear more “efficient.” Without standard disclosure or bundle transparency, it becomes difficult for the ecosystem to reward protection over extraction.

‍

‍