Solana’s Jito Mempool Disabled Amid MEV Bot Surge

Jito Labs, the developer of the Solana client, has announced the shutdown of its mempool due to ongoing MEV bot attacks.

Jito Labs has decided to suspend the mempool offered through the Jito Block Engine due to negative externalities impacting users on Solana.

The decision has been made after deliberate conversations with the Jito Labs team and key Solana ecosystem stakeholders.

— Jito Labs (@jito_labs) March 8, 2024

A mempool is a space where transactions are stored before being sent to the blockchain. Solana’s basic architecture lacks this structure, but the Jito team implemented their own based on the Jito Block Engine.

This solution allowed traders on the network to configure bots to front-run other users’ transactions and conduct “sandwich attacks.”

Jito’s terms of service prohibited front-running in the mempool, yet users still employed MEV strategies. Meanwhile, Solana’s low fees made “sandwich attacks” easy and inexpensive to execute, harming ordinary users.

“[The team] tried to develop solutions to reject sandwich packets, but our actions turned into a cat-and-mouse game with traders. Ultimately, we view MEV, including ‘sandwich attacks,’ as a drag on the Solana ecosystem, and in the absence of an engineering solution, we made the difficult decision to suspend the mempool,” a Jito representative told CoinDesk.

According to him, the developers consulted with other protocols on identifying trading bots and pricing mechanisms but did not find a suitable solution to the problem.

Jito’s main product is a liquid staking protocol based on Solana. According to DeFi Llama, its total value locked is approximately $1.26 billion.

Back in November 2023, a Uniswap liquidity pool creator lost over $700,000 in seconds following an MEV attack, likely due to a configuration error.

In October, a trading bot on BNB Chain earned $1.575 million from an attack costing $4.16.