Jito and the MEV Economy That Quietly Became Solana’s Most Important Infrastructure Layer
Jito (JTO), the MEV infrastructure and liquid staking protocol on Solana (SOL), ranked 178th by cryptocurrency market capitalization on May 12. The JTO token appeared on CoinGecko’s trending list as Solana’s on-chain activity remained elevated, with the network posting over $1.4 billion in 24-hour trading volume across its ecosystem.
Jito processes the majority of Solana’s MEV-related transaction ordering, making it one of the most operationally significant protocols on the network regardless of where its token ranks by market cap.
What MEV Is and Why It Matters on Solana
MEV stands for maximal extractable value, a term describing the additional profit that block producers can earn by controlling the order in which transactions are included in a block. On any blockchain, the entity producing the next block has discretion over transaction ordering.
That discretion has monetary value because certain orderings allow the block producer to front-run trades, arbitrage price differences across markets, or liquidate positions before other participants can react.
On Ethereum, MEV became a significant research and infrastructure topic starting in 2020. On Solana, the problem manifested differently because of the network’s parallel transaction processing architecture, but the economic dynamics are similar.
Validators and the searchers who compete to capture MEV represent a meaningful portion of total value flows on the network.
Jito addresses this by running a block engine that accepts MEV bundles, pre-packaged groups of transactions submitted by searchers who want priority inclusion. Searchers pay tips to validators running Jito’s software.
Those tips are split between the validator and Jito’s staking pool. Stakers who deposit SOL into the Jito liquid staking pool, receiving a token called jitoSOL in return, earn a share of the MEV tips in addition to standard staking rewards.
Background
Jito launched its liquid staking product on Solana in 2022, during a period when the network was still recovering from the damage caused by the FTX collapse in November of that year.
FTX and its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research had been significant Solana ecosystem participants, and their collapse removed liquidity from many Solana-based protocols.
Despite that environment, Jito’s MEV block engine gained adoption among Solana validators through 2023, driven by the direct financial incentive of additional tip revenue. By the time Solana’s memecoin trading boom arrived in late 2023 and through 2024, a substantial majority of Solana validators had adopted Jito’s software.
That adoption meant Jito’s block engine was routing transactions for most of the network’s block production.
The JTO governance token launched in December 2023 via an airdrop to early users and stakers. The airdrop attracted significant attention and established JTO as a tradeable asset with a market cap that reflected Jito’s central position in Solana’s infrastructure stack.
Jito’s protocol page showed over $2 billion in liquid staking deposits at various points in 2024, making it one of Solana’s largest staking venues.
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The Business Model and Its Risks
Jito’s revenue comes from two sources. Liquid staking fees, applied as a small percentage of staking rewards, and the spread from MEV tip routing, where a portion of tips paid by searchers flows to the protocol treasury and JTO stakers.
The model works well when Solana’s on-chain activity is high.
More trading activity means more arbitrage opportunities, more MEV tips, and higher yields for jitoSOL holders relative to unstaked SOL. During Solana’s memecoin trading peaks in early 2024, MEV tip volumes were large enough to make jitoSOL yields notably higher than bare SOL staking returns.
The risk runs in the opposite direction.
When Solana on-chain activity declines, MEV tip revenue falls, jitoSOL yield advantages shrink, and the case for holding JTO becomes harder to make on fundamentals alone. The token’s valuation embeds assumptions about sustained Solana activity that are not guaranteed.
A second risk is protocol-level competition.
Other Solana liquid staking providers, including Marinade Finance, offer competing products. Jito’s advantage is the MEV tip distribution, a feature tied directly to its block engine market share.
If validators adopted a competing block engine, that share could erode.
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What Comes Next for Jito
Two developments will shape Jito’s trajectory through the remainder of 2026. First, Solana’s activity level following the memecoin trading cycle, as the network needs sustained application usage beyond speculation to maintain MEV tip volumes at levels that justify current valuations.
Second, Jito has been expanding its restaking product, which allows jitoSOL holders to extend their stake to secure additional Solana-based protocols in exchange for additional yield. This mirrors the EigenLayer model on Ethereum and could create a new revenue stream independent of memecoin-driven MEV cycles.
JTO’s market cap at rank 178 reflects a market that values Jito’s operational importance without pricing in aggressive growth assumptions.
That is a reasonable starting point for an infrastructure protocol whose revenues are real but cyclical.
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