Over the past year, the Memecoin craze has turned Solana into a gold rush for traders. Countless people chased meme coins with extreme price fluctuations, attempting to gain an edge with trading bots. However, few realized that the truly guaranteed profitable business isn't dancing on price charts, but hidden deep in the blockchain's dark forest. This is MEV (Maximum Extractable Value).
Compared to publicly visible bot earnings, MEV profits are often hidden within block construction and sequencing mechanisms, typically controlled by the "invisible hand" wielding chain-level power and infrastructure. Many are unaware because this system has high operational barriers, extremely asymmetric information, and highly concentrated control.
While you use bots to front-run internal trades and prevent sandwich attacks, MEV hunters control transaction sequencing behind the scenes, precisely capturing arbitrage opportunities; when retail investors compete with speed and strategy, large institutions with staking advantages and node permissions already sit firmly at the top of the profit pyramid.
On Solana, MEV is more than just a trading opportunity—it's an infrastructure-level power that is controlled by a tiny few, forming a high-barrier, highly monopolistic, and highly profitable capital game. Today, we'll unveil the big business of MEV on Solana.
1. First, What is MEV?
MEV stands for Miner Extractable Value, referring to miners' ability to include, omit, and order transactions when packaging blocks to earn maximum additional revenue. Due to the Memecoin craze and DeFi activity, MEV's scale is enormous.
From a business perspective, MEV typically includes: liquidation, arbitrage, and sandwich attacks.
• Liquidation: Liquidating positions near default to obtain rewards.
When borrowers fail to maintain the collateralization ratio required in lending protocols, their positions become eligible for liquidation. MEV searchers monitor these under-collateralized positions on the blockchain and execute liquidation by repaying part or all of the debt in exchange for a portion of the collateral as a reward.
• Arbitrage: Buying and selling simultaneously on different DEXs to profit from price differences.
The simplest arbitrage occurs when two DEXs have different prices for the same trading pair, allowing arbitrageurs to profit from the price gap.
• Sandwich Attack: Buying before the target transaction and selling afterward for profit.
A sandwich attack is an arbitrage strategy in DeFi markets where attackers generate profit through three atomic bundled transactions: first, making an unprofitable front-running transaction to push asset prices to the victim's maximum slippage tolerance, then executing the victim's transaction at a high price, further driving up the price, and finally selling the asset at an artificially high price through a post-transaction to offset initial costs and generate net profit.
Behaviorally, it's typically distinguished as front-running and back-running.
• Front-running: MEV searchers identify another trader's buy or sell order in the mempool and place an identical order before that trader, profiting from the price impact on the other transaction.
• Back-running: The counterpart to front-running, this specific MEV strategy exploits temporary price imbalances caused by improper routing. Once a user's transaction is executed, reverse transaction searchers balance pool prices by trading the same asset and ensure profit.
Liquidations are always back-running, most arbitrage is back-running, and sandwich attacks are front-running + back-running. For specific MEV examples, refer to Helius's report, which provides very detailed explanations and examples.
2. How Big is the MEV Business?
According to some unverified statistics, last year trading bots earned $1.1 billion, pumps earned $500 million, MEV earned $1.5 billion, AMM earned $1 billion, Trump and other celebrity-associated parties earned $500 million, with nearly $5 billion taken off-market.
On the Solana network, with rising network activity and the 2024 Memecoin craze, MEV earnings on Solana have also dramatically increased. From Helius's report, Jito's arbitrage detection algorithm analyzed all Solana transactions, including those outside Jito bundles, identifying 90,445,905 successful arbitrage trades in the past year. The average profit per arbitrage was $1.58, with the highest single arbitrage earning $3.7 million. These arbitrages generated $142.8 million in profits, of which $126.7 million (88.7%) was denominated in SOL.
MEV is a big business!
3. MEV on Solana is Particularly Severe, with Jito as the MEV King
... (rest of the text continues)Competing for MEV opportunities on Solana is a battle of millisecond-level speed and on-chain information sensitivity. Whoever can fastest discover arbitrage opportunities and accurately submit transactions in the same/next Slot will capture the profits. This depends on two points:
* Rapid information synchronization capability, typically requiring connection to large Jito node RPC services;
* Fast transaction on-chain submission, prioritizing transaction submission through Jito Bundles and paying sufficient Tips.
2. Jito's bundle service is a monopolistic service.
The key to MEV is "who is the block producer (Leader)". For Jito to provide stable and reliable bundling services to traders, it must cover as many Leader Slots as possible. This requires its client to have extremely high network coverage to ensure that most rounds are produced by Jito nodes.
Once the critical point is reached, network effects self-reinforce: the more widespread the adoption, the more stable the service, and the harder it is for competitors to shake. This is why Jito could quickly consolidate 94% of client market share.
3. Solana's MEV is a capital game
Solana is a PoS chain where higher Staking increases the probability of becoming a Leader. The Leader who has block ordering rights can naturally obtain the most MEV and Tips. This creates a highly concentrated capital barrier:
* Large nodes with more Staking have higher block production frequency and faster information synchronization;
* More sensitive information leads to stronger arbitrage capabilities;
* RPC services of large nodes (even services in the same data center) see price increases, becoming scarce information entry points.
Those who can earn MEV often can only do so through the most capitalized large nodes.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the entire text, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms.]Solana currently has a staking rate of up to 65.6% (approximately 380 million SOL staked), controlling validator nodes, which means mastering the network's consensus mechanism and voting rights. Sol Strategies aggressively acquires top nodes, quickly entering the power core:
• November 2024: Acquired Cogent Crypto, a validator node operator for Solana, Sui, Monad, and ARCH networks, for $18 million (cash + stock), with a focus on the SOL network.
• March 2025: Acquired Solana's top validator nodes Laine and Stakewiz.com for 35 million Canadian dollars (cash + equity), increasing SOL staking to 3.3 million tokens (worth approximately $388 million), and recruiting Laine's founder Michael Hubbard as Chief Strategy Officer.
Step Two: Attempting to promote the inflation rate adjustment proposal SIMD-228 to further consolidate power. (The proposal ultimately did not pass)
Sol Strategies pushed the SIMD-228 proposal to adjust the inflation mechanism, aiming to introduce a dynamic inflation mechanism to replace the current fixed deflationary model. If the proposal had passed, Solana's annual inflation rate would have dropped from 4.68% to 1% or even 0%. Although the proposal was not ultimately approved, its strategic intent was clear:
• Stabilize SOL value: Reducing inflation can decrease new SOL releases, alleviate token selling pressure, and enhance long-term staking returns;
• Suppress small nodes and consolidate large node dominance: Reduced inflation would compress returns for all validators, but small nodes have weaker risk resistance and are more likely to be eliminated, favoring network centralization towards top validators.
Step Three: Manipulating interests on Solana. Advancing Solana ETF listing and institutionalizing crypto assets by becoming an ETF staking provider.
Sol Strategies became a staking provider for the 3iQ Solana Staking ETF and is promoting its listing, attempting to further expand staking volume and compete for blockchain governance leadership.
Summary:
1. MEV is a big business, especially on Solana, with high profits.
2. MEV protocols like Jito are monopolistic and have strong head effects.
3. Power on Solana is highly centralized, with MEV profits primarily captured by the Jito protocol, high-staking nodes, and block space sales brokers.
4. Currently, Solana has multiple clients, with the Jito-Solana client dominating the mainnet, and the Firedancer client supporting Jito protocol potentially becoming a future high-performance upgrade.
5. Solana is very suitable for institutional dominance. Sol Strategies' actions of acquiring nodes, attempting to promote governance proposals, and pushing ETF listings demonstrate how an institution can comprehensively penetrate Solana from technical, governance, and financial systems to compete for blockchain governance sovereignty.
