Solana Heavyweights Wage War Against Private Mempool Operators

A
group
of
Solana

(SOL)
validators
are
facing
financial
penalties
for
allegedly
facilitating
economic
attacks
against
crypto
traders.

Over
30
validator
operators
were
kicked
off
the
Solana
Foundation
Delegation
Program
over
the
weekend,
a
source
familiar
with
the
matter
said.
While
they
remain
validators
on
the
network,
they’re
no
longer
eligible
to
receive
what
amounted
to
payout
boosters
for
validating
transactions
on
the
Solana
blockchain.
Many
of
the
operators
were
Russians,
another
source
said.

The
purge
escalates
a
months-long
shadow
war
between
heavyweights
of
the
Solana
validator
ecosystem
and
an
underground
economy
of
validators
believed
to
be
exploiting
traders
for
profit
through
what’s
known
as
a
“sandwich
attack,”
whereby
bots
frontrun
and
backfill
trades
that
haven’t
yet
been
executed.

It’s
among
the
more
notorious

maximal
extractable
value,
or
MEV,
strategies
possible
on
blockchains
that
rely
on
mempools,
which
are
essentially
waiting
rooms
for
unconfirmed
transactions.
Solana
doesn’t
have
a
native
mempool,
but
the
wildly
popular
validator
software
developed
by
Jito
Labs
once
did.

In
March,
at
the
height
of
Solana’s
meme
coin
frenzy,
Jito
Labs

shut
off
the
mempool
function
because
it
was
exposing
traders
to
near-constant
and
costly
sandwich
attacks.
Jito’s
CEO
framed
the
move
as
being
in
the
best
interest
of
the
Solana
ecosystem
even
if
it
cut
off
one
potential
revenue
stream
for
validators,
the
server
operators
who
keep
things
running
on
this
decentralized
network.

Rather
than
completely
solve
the
problem,
Jito’s
move
pushed
it
underground.
Whispers
quickly
emerged
of
private
mempools
whose
operators
were
making
at
times
hundreds
of
thousands
of
dollars
by
enabling
sandwich
attacks.

One
proposal
from
infrastructure
operator
DeezNode
offered
validators
who
opted
into
its
private
mempool
50%
of
the
profits
generated
by
MEV,
according
to
documents
reviewed
by
CoinDesk.

A
Jito
Foundation
governance
post
from
late
Sunday
indicates
10%
of
the
JitoSOL
pool
is
being
delegated
to
validators
running
private
mempools.
The
Jito
Foundation
has
proposed
imposing
further
economic
penalties
on
those
validators
by
way
of
restricting
yet
more
staked
SOL.

Solana
Foundation’s
own
delegation
blacklist
is
small
as
a
portion
of
the
delegation
program.
It
targets
a
total
of
32
operators
that
together
had
1.5
million
SOL,
about
0.5%
of
program
stake,
a
source
said.

“Enforcement
actions
are
on
going
as
we
detect
operators
participating
in
mempools
which
allow
sandwich
attacks,”
a
representative
for
the
Solana
Foundation
said
Sunday.