Jito (JTO): JitoSOL, Solana’s MEV client and BAM block building, and what makes it risky

Jito Solana is less one product than four sharing a brand and a token. There is JitoSOL, a liquid staking token backed by about 10.2 million SOL; the Jito-Solana validator client and its Block Engine, which run the tip auctions behind most MEV on Solana; BAM, a newer block-building layer that runs inside secure hardware; and JTO, the governance token, which since July 2026 has been tied to a trading app called JTX. On DefiLlama, JitoSOL held $832.4 million at 19:30 UTC on 12 November 2026, against a peak of $3.91 billion on 26 January 2025.

The money side has shrunk faster than the brand. Protocol revenue fell for a fifth quarter in a row to $1.28 million in the second quarter of 2026, from $26.1 million in the first quarter of 2025, according to a Blockworks Advisory report funded by the Jito Foundation. At the same time Jito is asking Solana validators to hand block ordering to BAM, whose mainnet nodes are all run by Jito itself. This page explains how each piece works, who controls it, what JTO holders actually get, what the audits found and where the risks sit, with every figure dated.

What is Jito Solana? Four businesses under one name

Jito began as Jito Labs, a start-up that raised its first outside money in 2022 to build MEV infrastructure for Solana. MEV (maximal extractable value) is the profit someone can make by choosing the order of transactions in a block; our guide to MEV, front-running and sandwiches explains the idea from the start. On Solana there is no public mempool in the Ethereum sense, so Jito built its own route: a modified validator client that accepts “bundles” of transactions with a tip attached, and an off-chain Block Engine that auctions block space to the highest tippers.

The stake pool came next. JitoSOL lets anyone stake SOL with a basket of validators and receive a token that keeps rising against SOL as staking rewards and MEV tips arrive. The JTO token followed in December 2023, with an airdrop to early JitoSOL holders, validators running the Jito client and searchers. Since then the brand has added a restaking protocol, BAM and, in July 2026, JTX.

Readers tend to mix these up, and the risks differ. A JitoSOL holder bears stake-pool and validator risk. A validator running the Jito client depends on Jito’s off-chain services. A JTO holder holds a governance token whose link to revenue was, until July 2026, mostly a matter of DAO votes.

How JitoSOL works: a stake pool, a 4% fee and up to 400 validators

JitoSOL is issued by a stake pool built on the SPL stake-pool program, code written by Solana Labs rather than by Jito. A user deposits SOL and receives JitoSOL at the pool’s current exchange rate; the token is worth more than one SOL because rewards accumulate inside the pool rather than being paid out. On-chain, 7.79 million JitoSOL were in circulation on 12 November 2026, while DefiLlama counted about 10.22 million SOL underneath.

Fees are set by JTO holders. According to the JitoSOL FAQ, the pool takes 4% of rewards, after validator commissions, which the FAQ puts at roughly 0.3% of the deposited SOL’s value per year. Unstaking through Jito’s website costs 0.1% and a delayed unstake can take up to one epoch, about two days. The faster exit is to sell JitoSOL on a DEX aggregator such as Jupiter, at whatever discount or premium the market offers that minute.

Delegation is automated by StakeNet, an on-chain “steward” program. The FAQ says it targets the top 400 validators, scored on commission, voting performance, whether they run Jito’s MEV software and whether they are already too large, and that the selection runs again every 20 to 30 days. In practice the pool spread its stake over about 294 validators at the end of June 2026, down from 333 three months earlier, according to the Blockworks Advisory report. Since JIP-27 and JIP-28, part of the stake is directed to validators that run BAM.

That spread cuts both ways. No single operator holds much of the pool, but every operator in it can fail. When a Solflare validator went offline in late October 2026 after a key incident at its staking provider, the node listed on validators.app was a member of the Jito stake pool, as our report on the Solflare validator incident noted. A delinquent validator earns nothing, and the pool’s rewards shrink until StakeNet moves the stake.

The FAQ itself names two ways a JitoSOL holder could lose principal: a large slashing of validators, which it says does not exist on Solana at present, and a critical bug in the smart contracts. No depeg of JitoSOL against its redemption value has been reported, and no exploit of the pool has been made public as of 12 November 2026.

JitoSOL against other Solana liquid staking tokens

JitoSOL used to dominate. Its share of liquid-staked SOL was above 50% in 2024 and fell to 17.3% at the end of June 2026, per Blockworks Advisory, as Sanctum’s validator-branded tokens, exchange products and Jupiter’s jupSOL grew. Supply fell about 20% in the second quarter alone, from 12.35 million SOL to 9.86 million SOL, most of it in April. Our guide to liquid staking tokens compares how these designs differ.

The JitoSOL curve on DefiLlama shows the climb and the slide: $892 million on 17 February 2024, $3.10 billion on 12 November 2024, the $3.91 billion peak on 26 January 2025, $2.24 billion on 12 November 2025, a low of $611 million on 7 June 2026, then $947 million on 3 November 2026 and $832 million nine days later. Part of the move is the SOL price; the fall in SOL deposited shows the price explains only part of it.

Bundles, tips and the Block Engine: how Jito handles MEV on Solana

The Jito-Solana client is a fork of Agave, the main Solana validator software. A validator that runs it connects to Jito’s Block Engine, which receives bundles from searchers: up to five transactions that must execute in order, in the same slot, all or nothing. Bundles compete on the tip they pay relative to the compute they ask for. According to Jito’s developer documentation, auctions run in parallel every 50 milliseconds for each group of transactions touching the same accounts, and the minimum tip is 1,000 lamports.

Winning tips go to the validator, which shares them with its stakers. That is the second source of JitoSOL yield, after ordinary staking rewards. Jito takes a cut. Blockworks Advisory describes two layers: a 3% Block Engine fee and a 3% fee charged by the TipRouter, the program that distributes tips, for a combined 6% of tips, of which 5.7% goes to the DAO. Both are governance settings and have changed before.

The reach is wide. The Jito client family (the standard client plus its BAM version) ran on about 54% of active stake in the second quarter of 2026, down from near-universal use a year earlier as Firedancer, Harmonic and Rakurai gained users, and the Block Engine was used across 98% of stake, per the same report. Tips themselves fell: Jito processed about $9.9 million of tips in the second quarter of 2026, roughly half the $19.85 million of the first quarter.

The 2024 mempool shutdown and the sandwich problem

Jito once ran a mempool in its Block Engine, where pending transactions waited before landing in a block. Jito Labs suspended it on 8 March 2024, saying it had negative effects on Solana users, as CoinDesk and Blockworks reported. The mempool had made sandwich attacks easy: a bot buys just before a user’s swap and sells just after it. Sandwiching did not end; CoinDesk later described it moving to private mempools run by other parties, and staking pools including Marinade began excluding validators suspected of taking part.

Jito restaking and NCNs: a small side business

Jito (Re)staking applies the restaking model to Solana. Vaults accept SPL tokens such as JitoSOL and issue vault receipt tokens (VRTs); vault managers delegate to approved operators, who secure Node Consensus Networks (NCNs) such as oracles, bridges or Jito’s own TipRouter. The docs list TipRouter and Switchboard as supported NCNs, a 4% fee on rewards, a 0.1% withdrawal fee and a cooldown of two epochs. They also say slashing “may or may not be turned on” depending on the vault. DefiLlama counted $14.0 million in Jito restaking on 12 November 2026, less than 2% of JitoSOL’s total.

The JTO token: supply, unlocks and what holders get

JTO is a Solana token with a fixed genesis supply of 1 billion. The official docs split it four ways: 34.3% for community growth, which includes the 10% airdrop; 25% for ecosystem development; 24.5% for core contributors; and 16.2% for investors. Contributors and investors had a one-year cliff followed by three years of vesting. Tokenomist counted 74.27% unlocked and about 542.9 million JTO in circulation on 12 November 2026. Blockworks Advisory puts issued tokens at about 741 million at the end of June and expects the schedule to top out near 800 million.

What holders get is first a vote. One JTO equals one vote on Jito Improvement Proposals (JIPs), with no lock-up, and holders set the stake-pool and restaking fees, StakeNet and TipRouter parameters and the use of the treasury. The docs also say token holders have ultimate control over the Jito Foundation, including removing its directors. DefiLlama notes that JitoSOL fees are not shared with JTO holders. The only direct payment is small: the TipRouter passes 0.15% of the tips it distributes to JTO stakers, which Blockworks Advisory describes as the sole value holders received directly in the second quarter.

Value has reached the token only through buybacks voted by the DAO. The Cryptoeconomics SubDAO bought and burned about 13.5 million JTO by a time-weighted mechanism before April 2026; Blockworks Advisory counts 13.48 million burned at the end of June and notes that buybacks were paused in the second quarter because JIP-31 sent protocol revenue to the BAM subsidy instead. The DAO treasury reached $164.7 million at the end of June, up from $68.2 million, but mostly because the JTO it holds was revalued, not because new cash came in.

JTX and JIP-38: trading fees routed to JTO buybacks

JTX is a self-custody trading app founded by Jito, announced on 5 May 2026 and opened in phases from 14 July, starting with the first 1,000 people on its waitlist. It began with spot trading of memecoins, majors and tokenized stocks; on 5 November 2026 it added JTX Equities, with tokenized shares from Backpack and Ondo priced by quotes from the issuers. Perpetual futures and prediction markets are planned for later phases, with no date given.

JIP-38, posted on 13 July 2026 and passed by token holders the same month according to Solana Compass, sends 80% of JTX platform fees to the DAO and leaves 20% for JTX development. All of the DAO’s share goes to buying JTO on the open market and burning it, through a programme called the Rev Splitter run by the Dev Council, for at least one year, until a review in the fourth quarter of 2027. Changing that before the review needs a separate JIP. Some forum commenters asked for a longer commitment.

Two caveats matter. The 80% is a share of JTX fees, not of everything Jito earns: stake-pool and tip revenue keep their existing routes. And DefiLlama’s methodology, read on 12 November 2026, says the JTO bought with JTX fees has so far been held unburned in the DAO wallet. JTX’s own fee rates are not given in the documents cited here.

Jito revenue: from $26.1 million a quarter to $1.28 million

Blockworks Advisory counts $1.28 million of protocol revenue in the second quarter of 2026, down 45% on the quarter and the fifth decline in a row from $26.1 million in the first quarter of 2025. Staking fees (the 4% epoch fee and the withdrawal fee) brought $733,000, or 57%; tip-related fees brought $539,000. Revenue tied to transaction ordering fell most, which points to a smaller MEV market on Solana rather than a collapse in network use.

The latest data does not show a turn. DefiLlama’s parent “Jito” listing, read at 19:30 UTC on 12 November 2026, shows revenue of $553,570 over 30 days and $8.08 million over the past year. Its “fees” line, $128.3 million over a year, is mostly staking rewards and tips passed on to stakers and validators, not Jito’s income.

One more caution on sourcing. Blockworks Advisory’s quarterly reports on Jito are paid for by the Jito Foundation, as the report’s disclosure page states, and SolanaFloor, a widely read Solana news site, is owned by Jito. Both are useful for figures; neither is independent.

BAM: block building in secure hardware, run by Jito alone for now

BAM, the Block Assembly Marketplace, launched on mainnet in July 2025. It splits block production in two. BAM nodes receive transactions and decide their order inside Trusted Execution Environments, sealed areas of a processor meant to keep data private until it executes and to sign an attestation of the order used. Validators then build the block from that schedule. Applications can add “plugins” to sequence their own transactions; Maker Priority, the first revenue-generating plugin, entered testing in the second quarter of 2026. Validators join by running AgaveBAM or FireBAM, a version for Frankendancer.

Adoption came quickly, helped by money. Under JIP-31 the DAO paid BAM validators a subsidy of $1.2 million in the second quarter of 2026, and JIP-37 proposed keeping it at the full rate through the third quarter, funding matching JTO buybacks from reserves. Jito’s changelog of 9 October 2026 put BAM at about 164 million SOL across 385 validators, or 37% of network stake, in epoch 1050, as reported by Solana Compass.

Three features followed in autumn 2026. On 9 September BAM began sending preconfirmations, early signals that a transaction has been scheduled, through Helius and Triton One; Crypto Briefing reported a split of 35% of the revenue to validators, 35% to the DAO treasury and 30% to the distribution partners, with first payouts planned for October. On 13 October Jito announced Direct Bundle Ingest, which sends bundles straight to BAM nodes and skips a Block Engine hop of roughly 50 milliseconds. And around the activation of Alpenglow, Solana’s new consensus, on 21 October, Jito put all mainnet BAM nodes into maintenance mode and made Direct Bundle Ingest unavailable during the switch.

The open question is control. Every mainnet BAM node is operated by Jito. On 2 November 2026 Jito named Triton One, Bitwise and SOL Strategies as the first outside operators, starting on testnet, and access for any mainnet validator is targeted for early 2027. Until then, a growing share of Solana blocks is ordered by machines one company runs, with trust resting on hardware attestations that ordinary users cannot check themselves.

Who controls Jito: a Cayman foundation, a Delaware company and a 4-of-7 Dev Council

Three bodies share the power. Jito Labs, Inc., a Delaware corporation with 26 employees in the first quarter of 2026 according to the Blockworks token transparency filing, writes most of the code; Lucas Bruder is its co-founder and chief executive and Zano Sherwani its chief technology officer. The Jito Foundation, a Cayman Islands foundation company advised at the JTO launch by the law firm Walkers, holds the trademarks and runs jito.network; Brian Smith is its president. The DAO of JTO holders votes on JIPs through spl-governance, with Nick Almond as head of governance.

Two proposals posted on the Jito forum on 21 May 2026 rewrote the balance. JIP-35 replaced the DAO constitution of December 2023 and formalised a Dev Council of core contributors, including Jito Labs engineers, to run upgrades and parameters; its stated reason was that the Security Council had been called in too often. JIP-36 set out a “veto trigger”: one transaction, voted by token holders, that strips the Dev Council of every delegated authority and returns it to the DAO. JIP-38 in July describes both as in force.

Under JIP-36 the DAO controls a Manager multisig, which controls the Dev Council multisig on Squads; the Dev Council needs 4 of 7 signers and every transaction waits 12 hours before execution, with automatic alerts on sensitive instructions. Invoking the veto follows the normal JIP route: 250,000 JTO to propose, a five-day vote, a 1% quorum, a simple majority and a two-day cooldown. The Security Council is also 4 of 7, according to the Blockworks filing. The names of the Dev Council members, the Security Council members and the Foundation’s directors are not published in these documents.

The transparency filing has its own gaps: one section says the DAO can replace the Foundation board while another says the Foundation has no DAO control, and the Foundation is described as receiving no revenue although it was funded with a token grant at launch.

Jito audits: what the published reports found

Jito’s code has been reviewed several times, but not all of it. The reports below are the auditors’ own files or those in Jito’s official restaking audit folder on GitHub.

• Neodyme reviewed the MEV tip programs, the relayer and the modified validator from 4 July to 9 August 2022, in a report dated 12 September 2022. It found one medium issue (an authentication bypass in the relayer) and one low issue, both resolved. The Block Engine was explicitly out of scope.
• Certora reviewed the restaking and vault programs twice: 22 findings in its first report (August to September 2024), four of them high severity and 18 fixed, then seven findings in a second round (31 October to 11 November 2024), two high, six fixed.
• OtterSec audited the restaking program from 20 September to 10 October 2024 and reported eight findings, including a critical flaw that let users bypass withdrawal-ticket checks; the report marks it resolved.
• Offside Labs reviewed the vault program from 28 October to 6 November 2024 and found no critical or high issue, one medium and one low.
• Certora audited the Stake Deposit Interceptor (24 November to 13 December 2024): eight findings, one high (a cooldown time that could overflow), seven fixed.
• Certora audited the TipRouter (23 December 2024 to 13 January 2025, published 28 February 2025): 14 findings, six of them critical, including one that let an operator vote several times and steal MEV tips. All six critical issues were fixed.

The SPL stake-pool program under JitoSOL has its own audits, listed by Solana’s documentation. The reports above do not cover the Block Engine, BAM node software or the code behind JTX.

Regulation: the VanEck JitoSOL ETF and European ETPs

VanEck filed a registration statement for a JitoSOL ETF with the SEC on 22 August 2025, and on 10 March 2026 Nasdaq asked the SEC to approve a rule change to list it, because JitoSOL does not meet the generic listing standards. The SEC opened proceedings on 17 June. Its last published order on the file, dated 9 September 2026, set 15 November 2026 as the date by which it must approve or disapprove the rule change. The SEC had received no comment letters by then.

In Europe a product already exists. The 21Shares Jito Staked SOL ETP (JSOL) has traded on Euronext Amsterdam and Paris since 29 January 2026, with an expense ratio of 0.99%, per Blockworks Advisory, which put its assets at $890,000 at the end of June. In Asia, Jito signed a memorandum with Korea Digital Asset (KODA) in April 2026 and an earlier one with Hanwha Asset Management. In the US, Coinbase opened JitoSOL-backed USDC loans of up to $100,000 through Morpho on Base on 16 June 2026.

Funding, history and this month’s news

Jito Labs announced a $10 million Series A on 11 August 2022, bringing its total funding to $12.1 million, which leaves about $2.1 million raised earlier. Multicoin Capital and Framework Ventures co-led the round, with Solana Ventures, Delphi Digital, MGNR, Robot Ventures and 18decimal taking part, according to the company’s announcement; The Block also listed Alameda Research among the investors. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko was among the angels. No valuation was disclosed.

On 2 November Jito named its first outside BAM operators. On 3 November the Jito Foundation and the ORE project said they would hold each other’s tokens, ORE moving part of its reserve into JitoSOL, with sizes undisclosed, according to Crypto Briefing. On 5 November JTX Equities went live. And on 11 November Solana Mobile named Helius and Jito as the first outside Guardians of its dApp Store: operators that run automated checks on new apps and updates, each posting 250,000 SKR, with their votes recorded on-chain. Anza, DoubleZero and Triton One are to follow later.

Jito risks: what a JitoSOL or JTO holder takes on

Coindaro rates Jito 3 out of 5 for risk. The code base is audited, the stake pool rests on widely used Solana code and no hack of Jito’s own programs has been reported. Against that, revenue has fallen for five quarters, block ordering is being concentrated in nodes run by one company, and governance hands day-to-day control to a small council whose members are not named.

• JitoSOL holders depend on hundreds of validators; an outage or a commission change lowers the pool’s yield until StakeNet reacts.
• Selling JitoSOL on a DEX can mean a discount in a rush; the direct exit takes up to about two days.
• BAM ordering runs on Jito-operated nodes and trusted hardware until outside operators reach mainnet, targeted for early 2027.
• JTO’s buyback promise covers only the DAO’s share of JTX fees, and only until the fourth-quarter 2027 review.
• Revenue and MEV tips are falling, and the DAO spends part of its income on BAM subsidies.
• Reports on Jito’s finances are funded by the Jito Foundation, and one popular Solana news site is Jito-owned.

What to watch next

The SEC’s 15 November 2026 deadline on the VanEck JitoSOL ETF comes first. Then whether the October preconfirmation payouts appear on-chain, whether BAM leaves maintenance mode fully after Alpenglow, and when any mainnet validator can run its own BAM node, which Jito targets for early 2027. For JTO holders, the test is on-chain: JTX fees converted into JTO, and the day that JTO is actually burned, before the JIP-38 review in the fourth quarter of 2027.