When researching Jito for the Solana report we noticed a recent uptick in MEV, and what looked like an outlier epoch with 142 SOL in MEV rewards paid. Since then, that epoch looks like anything but an outlier, but rather the start of a new trend.
Curiously, Jito validator adoption has stayed roughly flat throughout this period and on-chain volumes haven’t risen, so the natural conclusion is that more searchers are starting to integrate and route their bundles through Jito. These seem to be dominated by 3 searchers: 2Fast1, benRLp & JAGUAR. The latter has more infrequent but larger bundles, with one topping out at 27 SOL.
The other aspect is the big SOL price drop from the SEC suits and Robinhood delisting, so that also explains the uptick in MEV. Continued adoption will improve both validator economics and network spam.
