Get MEV rewards by staking with P2P on Solana

We are pleased to announce that P2P has launched an MEV-enabled client on Solana validators which will allow P2P stakers to receive extra rewards from MEV starting today.

Maximum extractable value (MEV) is a growing capability in blockchain. It refers to the maximum profit a validator can make through its ability to include, exclude, or reorder transactions in the blocks it creates.  By running a MEV-enabled client on validators, P2Ps gain access to MEV Opportunities, which can increase staker APR while having a positive impact on the quality of the Solana network.

MEV-boosted client adoption

To maximize MEV rewards for stakers, P2P will use the open-source Jito-Solana Client, which has been audited by Neodyme, a leading security and blockchain auditing firm. Jito-Solana represents a meaningful improvement to Solana’s validator software. It was intentionally designed to maximize MEV rewards and optimize their distribution to network validators and stakers. In addition, Jito-Solana was designed to combat spam and improve network efficiency. One of the ways that Jito-Solana achieved this is through its optimization of transaction processing. Jito-Solana offers more efficient transaction processing by bundling transactions and optimizing transaction ordering, which reduces the number of duplicated and unnecessary transactions and enables faster processing times.

For implementation, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the impact of the Jito MEV client on Solana’s network performance and adoption among Solana validators. You can find the full report here.

The key takeaways are:

• The Jito client has been gaining traction among Solana validator operators, as reflected by the growing number of validators running the client (currently 80), their total active stake (~55M SOL), and their market share (~15%).
• We also observed a decrease in the average active stake per validator using the Jito client which indicates that more validators with smaller stakes are adopting the software. This trend is a positive sign as it shows that even smaller validators can successfully run the Jito client. The Jito client democratizes access to MEV with equal treatment for all validators. The growth in adoption by lower-stake validators demonstrates a strong interest in MEV opportunities from a community that was previously unable to access these benefits.
• The total Jito-generated MEV rewards are currently relatively low due to limited adoption and lack of MEV searcher participation. This situation should improve with broader adoption of the client and as searchers become more accustomed to the new tools. We observed a significant increase in MEV rewards after January 2023 suggesting that a large DeFi participant started using Jito's MEV extraction tools and we believe that others will soon follow.
• Jito-enabled validators have shown higher average uptime, a higher number of vote credits, and a significantly higher stake-weighted average block production rate.
• Careful statistical analysis showed that block production rate for validators that switched to the Jito client has increased significantly. The increase is likely due to the more efficient transaction processing enabled by the Jito client's optimized block engine.

Based on our research, we believe that the Jito client is a valuable addition to the Solana ecosystem, providing validators and their delegates with a new revenue stream from MEV capabilities while also improving the Solana network stability. Feel free to view the validator performance data, MEV validators rewards, MEV stakers rewards, and more using the public P2P Validator dashboard at: https://reports.p2p.org/superset/dashboard/jito_client_adoption/.

Security assurance

To implement the MEV client on P2P nodes, automation was prepared and tested to seamlessly switch between Jito and the standard Solana client with 0-downtime in this case. Infrastructure security is the most important thing and we would like to add details about the possible security risks validators may face when switching to the Jito client.

Basically, Jito client is a set of patches applied to a standard Solana client, so theoretically it may have new vulnerabilities or performance degradations in some situations on current or future releases. We discussed these issues with Jito labs and found that 2 independent auditors checked Jito code base and checked the stability of the client on our testnet validator.

Although the probability of validator performance degradation caused by Jito client is not zero, we don’t think it is a big problem since we always monitor the performance of our validators against cluster average performance statistics (vote success rate, block skip rate) with automated alerting if performance issues are detected. Generally, our monitoring system will allow us to make quick decisions about falling back to a standard Solana client.

There are certain things that must be taken into account when switching to a standard Solana client:

• Solana Foundation releases a new client with a request to update immediately. Usually, it happens, when the Foundation wants to close a vulnerability or fix stability issues. Jito labs need days or weeks to release its patched version (since it requires a lot of testing) so in such cases, we will switch to the standard client and wait for the Jito client release.
• We detect abnormal behavior of a validator according to our monitoring metrics or detect significant performance degradation (for example vote success rate is lower than the cluster average).
• We receive information from public or closed sources about a vulnerability revealed in the Jito client. In this case, all our validators immediately get moved to a standard client and we will get in touch with Jito labs to clarify the situation.

If switching to a standard client happened and it has been going on for more than 2 weeks we will notify you about that on our Twitter, so please subscribe to our Twitter to be up-to-date about our services

We believe that adopting the Jito client will drive MEV rewards. Performance should also improve even further as the client becomes more widely adopted and as searchers become accustomed to the new tools.

Sharing MEV rewards with SOL stakers

New and old P2P stakers alike have the opportunity to increase their revenue through extra MEV rewards. P2P will take an 8% commission from MEV rewards, distributing 92% of the rewards to stakers, according to their share.

The Jito Tip Distribution Program is the on-chain program that collects and distributes MEV rewards to eligible validators and stakers. At the end of an epoch, the MEV rewards earned by a validator are stored in a special account derived from the validator's vote account and the corresponding epoch.

Once the epoch is over, the validator generates a data structure containing the rewards claims for all validators and stake accounts and uploads it on-chain. Then validators and stakers receive the MEV rewards in the form of an automatic airdrop performed by Jito to the validators’ vote accounts and stakers stake accounts. The claim action is permissionless, meaning others could execute it if Jito failed to do so properly. Note that distributed rewards are not automatically staked (auto compounded) and the stake account owner is required to withdraw or stake the airdropped rewards.

Stakers and validators can check their rewards using the P2P Validator’s dashboard with Jito & MEV statistics or Jito’s MEV rewards dashboard. Anyone can check their rewards using public explorers, the details to do so are available in Jito’s documentation.

About P2P

P2P Validator began in 2018 with a mission to positively influence the development of POS technologies. At the time of the latest update, more than 750 million USD value is staked with P2P Validator by over 35,000 delegators across 40+ networks. We work closely with each network we support to push the developments of each project to new limits.

Beginning as seed investors and validating from the genesis block, we have shown tremendous support to the Solana ecosystem since day one and are now trusted with over $120m under management. Our proficiency is shown not only by our excellent validating track record & our published research papers written on network performance (Downtime, Skip Rate) to improve the network health and development, but also by our involvement across projects including Wormhole Bridge, Pyth, and Neon EVM to help build Solana’s network infrastructure.