Jito's Block Assembly Marketplace: Building Transparent Infrastructure for Solana's Future

The Solana ecosystem continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and few teams have been as instrumental in shaping its economic infrastructure as Jito. In a comprehensive discussion on Lightspeed, Lucas Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Jito, unveiled the vision behind their newest initiative: the Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM). This transparent block building system represents a significant step forward in addressing some of Solana's most pressing challenges while opening new doors for application innovation and market efficiency.

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The conversation delved deep into the mechanics of MEV on Solana, the growing problem of sandwiching attacks, the technical underpinnings of trusted execution environments, and the broader vision for Solana as a venue for trading every asset imaginable. What emerged was a picture of a network at an inflection point, where the tools for building a more transparent and efficient trading ecosystem are finally coming together.

The Genesis of Jito and Its Economic Engine

Jito has evolved from its humble beginnings into what Lucas describes as "the economic engine for Solana." The journey began in 2020 when Lucas was experimenting with MEV strategies on Ethereum. In early 2021, he discovered Solana through his first hackathon participation, and the difference was immediately apparent. While today Solana "just kind of feels normal," at the time the speed differential compared to Ethereum represented a "night and day difference" that captured his imagination.

Armed with his MEV background, Lucas founded Jito in 2021 with the mission of bringing sophisticated trading infrastructure to Solana. The company has since launched two flagship products that work in concert to create an economic flywheel for the network. The first is the Jito Solana Validator Client, which has generated more than $2.5 billion in additional value for validators and stakers since its inception. Lucas characterizes this system as "a trading layer on top of Solana that helps the network run more efficiently," drawing an analogy to Cloudflare's role in web infrastructure.

The second major product is JitoSOL, which has grown to become the largest liquid staking protocol on Solana with approximately 14 million SOL under management. These products don't operate in isolation but rather complement each other to drive value both to the Solana network and to Jito as an organization. The success of these initiatives laid the groundwork for the company's next ambitious project: BAM.

Understanding the Block Assembly Marketplace

The Block Assembly Marketplace emerged from Jito's extensive experience scaling the Solana network throughout 2024. The team had created the MEV infrastructure expecting it to be utilized primarily for traditional MEV trading activities like arbitrage and liquidations. However, adoption far exceeded expectations, leading to a period of intense focus on maintaining system reliability while fending off various denial-of-service attempts.

After this period of scaling challenges, Jito went "back to the drawing board" to identify where they could add the most value to the Solana network. This introspection was influenced by foundational MEV literature, particularly Dan Robinson's seminal article about the "dark forest" of Ethereum, which described how bots prowl blockchain networks looking to extract value from unsuspecting users.

Lucas observed this phenomenon manifesting on Solana with increasing intensity. "The forest is getting much darker," he noted, pointing to the lack of clarity around transaction sequencing and order flow. The network's operation had become opaque in ways that were problematic for both regular users and sophisticated traders trying to understand market dynamics.

BAM was created as a direct response to these challenges. At its core, BAM is a transparent block building system for Solana that runs its scheduler inside a trusted execution environment. This architectural choice provides two critical properties: confidentiality and verifiability. The trusted execution environment functions like a sealed box that processes transactions while preventing anyone—including the node operators themselves—from viewing the contents being processed.

The transparency aspect comes from the ability to verify what software is running inside the TEE. Users can query a BAM node and receive a cryptographically signed attestation of exactly which version of code is being executed. As Lucas explained, "People when they run BAM, it exposes the ability for people to see what version of software is running. So they know how the network works."

Solana's Sandwiching Problem

One of the most significant issues BAM aims to address is the proliferation of sandwich attacks on Solana. The team at Ghost Logs has conducted extensive research into this problem, developing a dashboard that tracks sandwiches across the network, identifying which validators are executing them, and quantifying the value being extracted from users.

The evolution of sandwiching tactics reveals the cat-and-mouse nature of MEV on blockchains. Initially, sandwiching was straightforward to identify and attribute: a user sends a transaction to a validator, that validator sandwiches it, and the validator can be clearly labeled as engaging in harmful behavior. When this behavior was exposed and stake began flowing away from offending validators, the attackers adapted.

The new technique, known as "wide sandwiching," is considerably more sophisticated and harder to detect. In this scheme, a validator receives a user's transaction but deliberately doesn't process it during their own slot. Instead, they sandwich the transaction on the next validator's slot. This creates the illusion that the first validator isn't sandwiching users, when in reality they're simply executing the attack with a one-slot delay.

"Once they showed that is like the main way that the sandwiching is happening today on Solana, it's all these wide sandwiches," Lucas explained. This behavior is obviously detrimental to users who are losing value to these attacks, but it also creates significant complications for traders and market makers trying to understand how the market actually operates.

The Chaos of Multiple Schedulers

Compounding the sandwiching problem is the proliferation of custom transaction schedulers across the Solana network. Jito has detected at least seven different schedulers in active use, though only about three are officially supported by the main clients. Agave runs one primary scheduler, which is essentially the same one Jito uses, while Firedancer supports multiple scheduler implementations.

Beyond these official options, numerous custom schedulers have been written that implement various "timing games." These modifications affect how validators pack their blocks—some may stall processing, some pack blocks halfway through a slot, and others employ different strategies entirely. Jito plans to release more detailed data on these practices in the near future.

For regular users, these differences may not be perceptible at the UX level. However, for traders and market makers, the inconsistency is extremely problematic. Lucas characterized the impact as "essentially jitter"—the unpredictable variation in how transactions are processed across different validators destroys the ability to model and predict network behavior.

The consequences flow directly to end users through worse execution quality. "For market makers and prop AMMs that don't understand this, they need to widen out their quotes and price in the uncertainty," Lucas explained. "And so ultimately it results in worse execution, worse pricing for users." The complexity of understanding Solana's transaction sequencing has become a significant barrier to entry for sophisticated market participants.

Application-Controlled Execution: A New Paradigm

One of the most innovative features planned for BAM is Application-Controlled Execution (ACE), which gives applications the ability to control how their transactions are sequenced. Rather than forcing applications to spin up their own L1 or L2 chains to gain control over transaction ordering, they can build directly inside BAM and access wide adoption immediately.

This represents a significant reduction in the barrier to entry for applications seeking customized execution guarantees. Instead of forking validator clients, conducting extensive business development to convince validators to run custom software, and managing the ongoing maintenance of a separate system, applications can leverage the BAM plugin architecture to achieve their goals.

The primary categories of applications expressing interest in ACE are perpetual DEXs and prop AMMs. Their motivation is similar: ACE enables market makers to provide tighter spreads and deeper liquidity by giving applications control over the relative advantage that market makers have over takers.

Lucas pointed to Hyperliquid as popularizing this concept in the broader market. Their implementation includes a speed bump for takers, giving market makers a small window to update quotes and cancel orders before taker transactions are processed. "We kind of have a similar request from BAM and applications on Solana," Lucas noted. "It's like, I want my market maker to have a 10 milliseconds speed advantage over the takers on this app."

Perpetual DEXs have an additional compelling use case: ensuring protocol solvency through prioritized liquidations. In volatile market conditions, certain transactions must execute to maintain the exchange's solvency, and ACE provides a mechanism to guarantee these critical operations are processed with appropriate priority.

The Challenge of Growing Stake

Currently, BAM is running on approximately 6% of Solana's stake. The path to broader adoption mirrors Jito's earlier experience rolling out the Jito Solana validator client, which Lucas described as a multi-year journey of patient relationship building and proving value.

During the early days of Jito Solana, the team made personal calls to validators, explaining MEV concepts and the benefits of their software. The revenue numbers tell the story of gradual then explosive growth: 2022 generated just $3 in Jito tips, 2023 produced a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars, and 2024 has seen approximately $600 million in value.

The pitch for ACE becomes significantly more compelling as BAM's stake share increases. At 6% coverage, the functionality is limited and doesn't yet represent a compelling enough opportunity for busy application teams to dedicate engineering resources. Lucas believes the inflection point will come around 15-30% stake coverage, at which point integration becomes "a no-brainer for applications."

The primary hesitation from validators centers on the inherent risk of running new software. "New software, people don't always want to be first movers," Lucas acknowledged. To address this concern, Jito is taking a page from Double Zero's playbook by using delegation programs to incentivize experimentation. A recent proposal was submitted to the Jito DAO to begin delegating JitoSOL stake to validators running BAM, creating a meaningful financial incentive for early adopters.

Performance Parity and Competitive Metrics

For BAM to achieve broad adoption, it must match or exceed the performance of Jito Solana. The key metrics validators care about are compute units per slot, priority fees per slot, and tips per slot. Lucas reported that BAM is "essentially the same as Jito Solana" on these measures, which can be independently verified on the Firedancer team's reports dashboard at reports.firedancer.io.

However, Lucas believes there's still optimization potential to unlock. "I think there's a little more juice we can squeeze from BAM to make it more performant than Jito Solana," he said. The team is focused on this performance work alongside reliability improvements to prepare for broader network deployment.

The current relatively small stake share, while limiting the value proposition for applications, provides a silver lining: it enables rapid iteration without catastrophic consequences if something goes wrong. The team is building out monitoring systems, PagerDuty integrations, and redundancy infrastructure while learning from the unique edge cases that mainnet exposure reveals.

"Every day there's something new that we discover," Lucas shared. Examples include unexpected internet connectivity issues between validators, periods of unusually high latency, and performance degradation during program updates that didn't manifest on testnet. This real-world debugging process is essential preparation for operating at scale.

The Technical Foundation: Trusted Execution Environments

BAM's security and transparency guarantees rest on trusted execution environments, specifically AMD's SEV-SNP (Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging). While TEEs have existed for many years—present in everything from iPhones to Mac laptops to server-grade processors—the technology has evolved considerably.

Earlier implementations like Intel's SGX have been broken multiple times, but newer variants like SEV-SNP offer significantly better security and performance characteristics. Lucas reported seeing only 5-10% performance degradation compared to bare metal, with room for further optimization. This is a dramatic improvement over older TEE technologies that imposed much heavier overhead.

Conceptually, the TEE functions as "a computer inside of a computer"—specifically, a virtual machine where all memory is encrypted. As the host operator, you cannot observe the contents of the memory within the TEE. This confidentiality is critical for BAM's operation, ensuring that even Jito itself cannot see the contents of transactions being processed.

The other crucial property TEEs provide is attestation. When queried, a TEE can report exactly what software it's running, with that report signed by a key burned into the chip during manufacturing. This signature chain can be traced back to AMD's root certificate, providing cryptographic proof of the code's authenticity.

"You can basically go to the node and be like, 'Hey, what version of code are you running?' It says 'I'm running this code.' And then someone can go to GitHub and be like, 'Oh, this image hash matches this version of code,'" Lucas explained. This creates the foundation for trustless verification of BAM node behavior.

Why TEEs Over Zero-Knowledge Proofs or FHE?

The conversation naturally turned to alternative cryptographic approaches, particularly zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which have garnered significant attention in the crypto space. Lucas was clear that he's "not a tech maxi" and believes in using the right tool for each job.

The primary limitations of ZK and FHE for BAM's use case center on performance and applicability. BAM operates at the millisecond and microsecond level, where even small performance penalties compound into significant delays. Neither ZK nor FHE currently offers the speed required for real-time transaction scheduling.

Beyond performance, there are fundamental compatibility questions. "Can't really have ZK read off a socket to read in packets," Lucas noted, highlighting how the programming model of these cryptographic techniques doesn't naturally fit BAM's requirements. The straightforward nature of TEE integration—you can write code in Python, Rust, C, or any other language, deploy it in a standard Linux environment, and it simply works—makes it the clear choice for today's implementation.

That said, Lucas expressed openness to revisiting this decision as technology evolves. "A lot of tech is in the worst spot that it'll ever be. The tech's always getting better," he observed. The same principle applies to TEEs themselves, which continue to improve with each generation.

Ecosystem Collaboration: Jito's Unique Position

The discussion touched on an interesting dynamic in Solana's validator ecosystem. Jito occupies a somewhat unique position, operating not as a competitor to Agave or Firedancer but as a complementary layer that enhances any base client. The ecosystem currently sees combinations like "Agave plus Jito," "Frankendancer plus Jito," and "Agave plus Jito BAM."

This positioning allows Jito to focus on MEV-related innovation without getting drawn into the broader validator client competition. The different teams address distinct problem spaces: Agave and Firedancer compete on core protocol implementation and performance, while Jito adds economic optimization and now transparent block building on top.

The collaborative nature extends to exciting developments across the ecosystem. Lucas highlighted XDP (eXpress Data Path) as one significant improvement being tested and rolled out, offering over 100x faster state propagation across the network. This enhancement is the only remaining blocker to increasing compute units from 60 million to 100 million per slot.

Firedancer's continued development is another major milestone on the horizon. While Frankendancer currently pairs the Firedancer networking stack with mostly Agave components, the full Firedancer client will eventually provide a completely independent implementation. Beyond that, Alpenglow represents the next major consensus upgrade, promising much faster finalization times.

The Speed of Innovation with BAM

One of BAM's advantages that Lucas repeatedly emphasized is the ability to ship improvements at a dramatically faster pace than is possible with core validator client changes. Significant modifications to the validator client can take multiple months to roll out safely, as evidenced by the XDP and new transaction parsing features that required extended testing periods.

BAM, by contrast, enables same-day deployment of new features from development through production testing. "You can basically roll out stuff within the same day that you develop it and test it in prod. And that is very powerful because you're just shipping at a much higher frequency," Lucas explained.

This agility isn't recklessness—it's enabled by BAM's current smaller stake footprint and will require appropriate caution as adoption grows. But it does position BAM as what Lucas calls "a sandbox for innovation on the network," where new ideas can be tested quickly without endangering the broader ecosystem.

The team has an extensive ideas document with 20-30 potential features and plugins that could add value to the network. External parties have also begun approaching Jito with proposals for building inside BAM, suggesting the platform is already generating ecosystem interest beyond Jito's own roadmap.

The Internet Capital Markets Vision

Lucas articulated a bold vision for Solana's future: becoming the venue where every tradeable asset can be accesse and traded. This vision, which he attributed to various ecosystem voices including MERT and Benedict, represents a significant evolution from parochial thinking about blockchain competition.

"You should be able to trade every asset on Solana. No one cares if Hype's a competitor or Monad or whatever, like just pull in every single asset that you can onto Solana," Lucas said. The goal isn't to prevent users from being aware of other chains but to ensure they never need to leave Solana to access any market they want.

Recent developments suggest this vision is materializing. The Monad token launch saw significant volume flowing through Solana-based venues, with Solana potentially capturing the number one position for decentralized platform volume. Zcash trading has also become available on Solana through various integration efforts.

This approach relies on infrastructure partnerships like Wormhole and protocols like Sunrise DeFi that work to bring native assets from other chains onto Solana. The mentality shift from viewing other chains as competitors to viewing them as asset sources represents a maturation of the ecosystem's strategic thinking.

The Evolution of AMMs and Prop Trading

The discussion touched on the ongoing evolution of automated market makers on Solana, with particular attention to the rise of prop AMMs (proprietary automated market makers). These systems have commanded increasing market share by offering greater efficiency and customizability compared to traditional constant product or concentrated liquidity market makers.

Lucas expects the prop AMM trend to continue, noting their superior capital efficiency and the ongoing innovation in the space. However, he declined to characterize himself as either a "prop AMM maxi or hater," preferring to watch how the competitive dynamics unfold.

The integration between BAM's ACE functionality and prop AMMs could prove particularly significant. By allowing prop AMMs to implement custom execution logic—such as speed bumps for takers—they can offer market makers better guarantees, leading to tighter quotes and deeper liquidity. This improvement flows through to end users in the form of better execution prices.

JitoSOL: New Frontiers in Liquid Staking

While much of the conversation focused on BAM, Lucas also provided updates on JitoSOL's roadmap. Two major developments stand out: the potential for a JitoSOL ETF and the implementation of directed staking.

The ETF opportunity builds on the broader momentum around crypto ETFs, though Lucas noted that the most interesting opportunities might be less obvious than the direct ETF itself. Various trading instruments and financial products built on top of the ETF structure could unlock significant new demand, though the specifics require expertise beyond Lucas's immediate focus.

Directed staking addresses a key friction point in institutional adoption of JitoSOL. Large institutional players typically operate their own validators as a significant revenue stream. When approached about supporting JitoSOL, their natural response has been that liquid staking competes with their validator business.

Directed staking solves this conflict by allowing large stakers to specify which validator receives their minted JitoSOL stake. "If you are a large staker and you mint JitoSOL, then you can basically direct it to a validator," Lucas explained. This alignment of incentives should "unlock a lot of doors" for integrations with institutional players who can now support JitoSOL while continuing to benefit from their validator operations.

A recent DAO proposal put this system up for vote, marking progress toward implementation. The feature essentially transforms JitoSOL from a potential competitor to validators into a tool that can enhance their business model.

Looking Forward: The BAM Roadmap

As the conversation concluded, the path forward for BAM crystallized around several key milestones. The immediate priority is completing the audit process that will enable open-sourcing the code. Once open source, the attestation functionality becomes meaningful—users can verify that the code running matches a specific commit on GitHub.

Growing stake remains the central challenge and opportunity. The current 6% represents a strong foundation for debugging and optimization, but the value proposition for applications increases nonlinearly as coverage grows. The JitoSOL delegation program should help accelerate this growth by providing economic incentives for validators to experiment with the new software.

The plugin architecture represents BAM's long-term potential. While ACE is the first major planned feature, the platform is designed to support a wide range of innovations in transaction sequencing and block building. As more developers build inside BAM, additional fee streams will emerge that can be shared with validators, creating a virtuous cycle of adoption and value creation.

Lucas expressed confidence that BAM will follow a similar trajectory to Jito Solana: slow initial growth followed by an exponential increase as the network effects kick in. The patience required for this approach is considerable, but the foundation being laid today should enable rapid acceleration once critical mass is achieved.

The Broader Context: Solana's Maturation

The developments discussed in this conversation reflect Solana's ongoing maturation from a fast but simple network into a sophisticated financial infrastructure. The challenges being addressed—sandwiching attacks, scheduler inconsistency, opaque block building—are problems that emerge only when a network reaches a certain scale of economic activity.

That Solana is grappling with these issues is itself a mark of success. The $2.5 billion in additional value generated for validators through Jito represents real economic activity that needs to be managed and optimized. The traders and market makers demanding better transparency are sophisticated participants whose presence indicates a healthy market.

The technical solutions being developed—TEE-based transparent block building, application-controlled execution, directed staking for liquid staking protocols—demonstrate the ecosystem's capacity for innovation. These aren't simple patches but thoughtful architectural solutions that address root causes while enabling new functionality.

As Solana continues to attract assets and trading volume from across the crypto ecosystem, the infrastructure supporting that activity must evolve in parallel. Jito's work on BAM represents a significant contribution to that evolution, promising a future where the mechanics of transaction sequencing are transparent, predictable, and optimizable for all participants.

Facts + Figures

• Jito has generated more than $2.5 billion in additional value for validators and stakers through the Jito Solana Validator Client since its inception.

• JitoSOL is the largest liquid staking protocol on Solana with approximately 14 million SOL under management.

• BAM is currently running on approximately 6% of Solana's stake weight.

• Jito has detected at least seven different transaction schedulers in active use across the Solana network, though only about three are officially supported by main clients.

• Revenue growth for Jito tips: $3 in 2022, a few hundred thousand to a few million in 2023, and approximately $600 million in 2024.

• BAM's trusted execution environment (AMD SEV-SNP) shows approximately 5-10% performance degradation compared to bare metal, with room for further optimization.

• The key metrics for validator performance are compute units per slot, priority fees per slot, and tips per slot—BAM matches Jito Solana on all three.

• XDP (eXpress Data Path) offers over 100x faster state propagation and is the only blocker to increasing compute units from 60 million to 100 million per slot.

• Jito's ideas document contains 20-30 potential features and plugins for BAM development.

• Lucas believes 15-30% stake coverage is the inflection point where ACE integration becomes compelling for applications.

• A Jito DAO proposal was recently submitted to delegate JitoSOL stake to validators running BAM.

• Wide sandwiching—where validators delay processing user transactions to sandwich them on subsequent slots—is currently the main form of sandwich attacks on Solana.

• BAM will be open-sourced following completion of an upcoming audit.

• The Monad token launch saw Solana potentially capturing the number one position for decentralized platform volume.

• Directed staking for JitoSOL allows large stakers to specify which validator receives their stake, addressing institutional adoption friction.

Questions Answered

What is BAM and why did Jito create it?

BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace) is a transparent block building system for Solana that runs its scheduler inside a trusted execution environment. Jito created it to address the growing opacity in Solana's transaction sequencing and to combat issues like sandwiching attacks. The system provides two key properties: confidentiality, ensuring that transaction contents remain private during processing, and verifiability, allowing users to confirm exactly what code is running. BAM emerged from Jito's experience scaling their MEV infrastructure and observing how the "dark forest" of trading bots was creating an increasingly opaque and potentially harmful environment for users.

How does sandwiching work on Solana and why is it a problem?

Sandwiching attacks on Solana have evolved from simple single-validator attacks to sophisticated "wide sandwiching" schemes. In a traditional sandwich, a validator receives your transaction and places their own trades before and after yours to extract value. In wide sandwiching, a validator receives your transaction but deliberately doesn't process it during their slot, instead sandwiching it on the next validator's slot. This makes the attacking validator appear innocent while still extracting value from users. The practice results in direct financial losses for users and creates uncertainty that forces market makers to widen their spreads, ultimately leading to worse execution prices for everyone.

What is Application-Controlled Execution (ACE)?

ACE is a planned feature for BAM that allows applications to control how their transactions are sequenced within blocks. Instead of spinning up their own L1 or L2 blockchain to gain transaction ordering control, applications can build plugins directly inside BAM and access wide network adoption immediately. The primary use cases are perpetual DEXs and prop AMMs that want to implement features like speed bumps for takers, giving market makers a small time advantage (such as 10 milliseconds) to update quotes before taker orders are processed. This leads to tighter spreads and deeper liquidity, ultimately benefiting end users with better execution prices.

How do trusted execution environments provide security for BAM?

BAM uses AMD's SEV-SNP trusted execution environment, which functions as a virtual machine where all memory is encrypted. The host operator cannot see into the contents of this encrypted memory, providing confidentiality for transactions being processed. The TEE also provides attestation capabilities—when queried, it reports exactly what software is running, with that report cryptographically signed by a key burned into the chip during manufacturing. This signature can be traced back to AMD's root certificate, providing verifiable proof that the code matches what's published on GitHub. This combination eliminates the trust issue where users would otherwise need to trust Jito or validators about what code is actually running.

Why is BAM using TEEs instead of zero-knowledge proofs or FHE?

TEEs are the current best fit for BAM's requirements because of performance and programming model considerations. BAM operates at millisecond and microsecond timescales where performance penalties compound significantly—the 5-10% overhead from TEEs is acceptable while ZK and FHE would impose much heavier costs. Additionally, the programming model of ZK and FHE doesn't naturally fit BAM's needs—you can't have ZK proofs read from network sockets to process packets. TEEs allow developers to write in any language (Rust, Python, C++) and deploy in standard Linux environments with minimal modification. Lucas emphasized he's not a "tech maxi" and remains open to revisiting this as cryptographic technologies improve.

What metrics matter for BAM's competitiveness with Jito Solana?

The three key metrics validators care about are compute units per slot (how much gas is being used), priority fees per slot, and tips per slot. BAM currently performs equivalently to Jito Solana on all three metrics, which can be independently verified on the Firedancer team's reports dashboard at reports.firedancer.io. Jito believes there's additional optimization potential in the BAM node that could eventually make it more performant than Jito Solana. As BAM adoption grows, additional fee streams from ACE and other plugins will provide further economic incentives for validators.

How will directed staking help JitoSOL institutional adoption?

Large institutional players often operate their own validators as a significant revenue source. When approached about supporting JitoSOL, they've historically objected because liquid staking would direct stake away from their validators, reducing their income. Directed staking solves this by allowing large stakers who mint JitoSOL to specify which validator receives their stake. This alignment of incentives transforms JitoSOL from a potential competitor to validator businesses into a complementary tool. Institutions can now support JitoSOL while continuing to benefit from stake delegation to their own validators, unlocking significant new integration opportunities.

What is Solana's vision for becoming a global trading venue?

The vision is for Solana to be the venue where every tradeable asset can be accessed, regardless of which blockchain it originated on. Rather than viewing other chains like Monad or Hype as competitors, the approach is to pull every possible asset onto Solana through integrations with bridges like Wormhole and protocols like Sunrise DeFi. Recent evidence suggests this is working—the Monad token launch saw significant volume on Solana-based venues, potentially making Solana the number one decentralized platform for that trading. The goal is for users never to need to leave Solana to access any market, eventually achieving price discovery on Solana for assets across the crypto ecosystem.

What's the current state of scheduler diversity on Solana?

Jito has detected at least seven different transaction schedulers in active use on Solana, though only about three are officially supported by the main clients (Agave and Firedancer). Beyond official implementations, various validators run custom schedulers implementing different "timing games"—some stall processing, some pack blocks halfway through slots, and others use various strategies. This inconsistency is essentially jitter for traders and market makers, who cannot predict how their transactions will be handled by different validators. The uncertainty forces market makers to widen their quotes to price in unpredictable behavior, ultimately resulting in worse execution for end users.