Solana Leaps Ahead in MEV Race by Making Transaction Ordering Transparent

In July 2025, Jito Labs launched the Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) on Solana, introducing a programmable blockspace layer aimed at solving the long-standing issue of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV).

From Bug to Business

Like many other blockchains that prioritized performance and scalability, Solana initially did not design explicitly around MEV. As a result, it emerged organically: block producers (validators) could privately accept transaction bundles from “searchers”—specialized actors or bots who scanned the mempool for profitable opportunities like arbitrage or liquidation, and paid to have their bundles included at the top of the block. This dynamic gave rise to priority fees, where market participants competed for transaction ordering—often at the expense of ordinary users.

According to Jito’s estimates, over $70 million per year was extracted from Solana DeFi through MEV, and 60–70% of all priority fees were captured by the top 10 validators.

Recognizing both the economic potential and the systemic risks of this model, Solana’s leadership took a proactive stance. Rather than ban MEV, they looked for ways to channel it transparently and equitably. This vision gave rise in 2022 to projects like Jito. The startup focused on tools and services that enabled validators to accept private transaction bundles from searchers, allowing the network to tap into MEV revenue while beginning to formalize its mechanics.

“MEV is a rapidly growing business model for blockchains,” said Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. “Jito has a great approach to maximize the benefits of MEV to the network and minimize the negative externalities of MEV to the rest of the users and applications running on Solana.”

Jito initially acted as a private MEV auction system, layered onto Solana without being deeply integrated into the protocol. With the launch of BAM, Jito has taken that mandate a step further—embedding MEV logic directly into the Solana protocol through programmable, secure infrastructure.

For regular users and developers, BAM represents a major shift: rather than being passive participants in a hidden bidding war, they can now interact with Jito openly. Developers can write plugins to define how their app's transactions should be prioritized. Power users and trading bots (searchers) can submit bundles through public interfaces instead of private deals. And most importantly, the system creates a verifiable, transparent path for value distribution, so that MEV is no longer an exploit—but a shared part of the network’s economy.

Ethereum’s PBS Model: A Decentralized Fix, But Not Without Risks

Ethereum faced MEV even earlier than Solana, and it responded post-Merge with the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) architecture and the MEV-Boost system.

In Ethereum’s PBS logic, block builders construct full blocks from mempool transactions, optimizing for profit—including MEV opportunities. They submit blocks to relays, which forward them to validators (proposers). Validators then choose the highest-paying block, earning extra income on top of normal block rewards.

While PBS has boosted validator revenue and reduced gas wars, it has also concentrated power in a few dominant builders. This, in turn, has sparked concern over censorship risks, especially with compliance-filtering builders.

Currently, the three largest builders construct the majority of Ethereum blocks:

Similar to Solana, Ethereum developers are now working on “enshrined PBS” to move these mechanics into Ethereum’s protocol layer—removing reliance on third-party infrastructure.

How Blockchains Tackle MEV Differently

Among blockchains grappling with MEV, Sei stands out with an architecture that takes a unique path toward minimizing it. As a specialized trading chain, Sei implements a built-in matching engine with native price-time priority, aiming to neutralize frontrunning and latency arbitrage at the protocol level. Its design treats blockspace as an execution layer for fair trading, not a battlefield for extractive ordering games. In that sense, Sei tackles MEV by eliminating the need for it in the most MEV-prone environment—DeFi trading.

Similarly, Sui and Aptos—two Move-based chains—leverage parallel execution and conflict tagging, where transactions declare in advance what state they will touch. This makes ordering less impactful, reducing the surface area for MEV and minimizing contention for execution order.

Another class of chains approaches the MEV problem by concealing transaction intent—making it harder or impossible to exploit ordering advantages in the first place:

• Osmosis (Cosmos):
  Uses threshold encryption, where transactions are encrypted when submitted and only decrypted after they're included in a block. This removes the opportunity for frontrunning by hiding trade details from validators and searchers during ordering.
• Aleph Zero:
  Built with zero-knowledge privacy, Aleph Zero supports private smart contracts where both transaction logic and data are hidden. This design prevents MEV by ensuring no one can predict or simulate a transaction’s impact until it's finalized.

Finally, there are blockchains that don’t have a meaningful MEV problem—not because they solved it, but because their architecture or usage patterns never allowed it to emerge.

• Cardano, using its eUTXO model, processes transactions deterministically with local mempools and no gas-based prioritization. This makes frontrunning or reordering impractical.
• Bitcoin lacks smart contracts and complex state interactions, so while miners can still choose transaction order, there’s little economic gain to be had from doing so.

In these systems, MEV either has no room to form, or is structurally suppressed through deterministic execution, minimal programmability, or the absence of complex DeFi markets.

To Block, or to Extract Value?

When blockchains were first introduced, their main purpose was to serve as decentralized rails for digital money—secure, censorship-resistant systems for peer-to-peer payments. But as these networks evolved into platforms for programmable finance, hosting everything from decentralized exchanges to lending protocols, their underlying architecture began to reveal new challenges.

Unlike centralized systems, where transaction flow is strictly controlled and hidden behind closed infrastructure, blockchains are transparent and permissionless by design. To reach consensus among thousands of independent nodes, transactions are batched into blocks and broadcast publicly before being finalized. This openness—essential to decentralization—comes with a trade-off: anyone can see what others are trying to do, and block producers get to decide the final order of transactions.

MEV wasn’t a bug—it was a natural consequence of building public, stateful systems that are economically meaningful. It arose not from bad actors, but from the incentives baked into how blockchains function.

Now, blockchains are adapting. As their role has expanded beyond simple payments into core financial infrastructure, they are beginning to treat MEV not as an exploit to be patched, but as a structural component to be managed.

Rather than fight MEV in the shadows, chains like Solana are choosing to integrate it into the protocol, creating transparent markets where transaction ordering is governed by open logic and economic alignment.