Quant traders pay $4,000 monthly for early Solana trade access

Validators are taking payments from as low as 10 SOL ($1,000) per month to give early access to Solana trades they receive for block creation, a fresh probe has found.

Maximal extractable value (MEV) is reportedly being sold to quantitative traders through a highly valuable real-time feed of transactions before execution.

Andrei Vacariu of Corvus Labs followed the payments to a vault where Everstake — headed by David Kinitsky, formerly Grayscale's founding general manager — offers a private feed of pending trades for $4,000 per month.

Vacariu further alleged that Everstake's sales team is recruiting additional validator node operators into the arrangement, promising more than 10 SOL monthly.

Armed with such data, sophisticated traders are said to be able to front-run and sandwich-attack ordinary orders on decentralized exchanges.

‘Every trader on Solana’

Vacariu explained what his claim means for ordinary Solana users: “Every trader on Solana hits these slots, can’t tell which leaders mirror their traffic, and can’t opt out.”

Everstake, operating one of Solana's biggest validators with roughly 7.4 million SOL staked to it, asserts that it employs “filtering mechanisms specifically to prevent this type of activity” and does not promote front-running or sandwich attacks.

Due to this setup, Everstake's traffic gets priority through an institutional “stake-weighted quality of service” tier, which it repackages under the name Blockspace.

No public mempool, just high-priced, private mempools

Blockspace's expensive service exists only because Solana lacks a public mempool.

Unlike the typical free and accessible mempools of pending transactions on other blockchains, the majority of Solana transactions go directly to the validator that is scheduled to produce the next block, without waiting in any public mempool.

This design was intended to be beneficial. Only the designated validator would see a trade before execution, which ought to reduce MEV.

But MEV opportunities have not vanished under this system. Rather, they have coalesced into an elite group of clients who can pay thousands of dollars for portions of MEV opportunities directly from validators that have more than 15,000 SOL staked on Solana.

Clients can operate Everstake's software, mirroring incoming traffic to Everstake's servers before a block is created and pushing through new transactions ahead of (or immediately after) retail orders.

Solana validators on the payroll

Everstake is not one validator but a group of 39 validators that together have staked over 50 million SOL.

According to Vacariu, payments from Blockspace's revenue-sharing wallet have disbursed to Prostaking, RockawayX, Staking Facilities, and Stake.org.

Staking Facilities reportedly received over 950 SOL in these payments since July, while Prostaking allegedly took more than 200.

Other significant entities in the Solana ecosystem, Blockspace noted, operate MEV infrastructure using different architectures.