What Are Jito Bundles and Jito Tips
A Jito bundle is a sequence-locked batch (maximum five) Solana transactions, either executed all in the right order or not at all. A Jito tip is what is attached to a bundle as a fee or "bid" to encourage a validator to include the bundle (above and beyond any normal transaction fees for a transaction included in a block) in their block. Bundles and tips constitute Solana's primary market for transaction ordering.
A simple analogy is the closing on a house: The wire transfer of money, transfer of title, handing over the house keys, and everything that goes into it happens at once. If a buyer pays but doesn't receive the house, the house doesn't change hands. Bundles offer traders a similar assurance of the "all or nothing" principle: buy on one exchange, sell on another, and if either transaction fails, neither happens.
How Bundles and Tips Work Technically
Searchers run software to detect profit opportunities like price discrepancies between DEX liquidity pools and create these bundles that get sent to Jito's Block Engine, an off-chain system that pre-simulates all bundles to see if they are profitable (for the searcher) and valid and sends them to the current leader for inclusion in the current slot (400ms). The "leader" is the validator building the current block, and the ordering of transactions within a bundle is guaranteed: transaction A comes before B and no other transaction is "in-between."
Tips are how searchers bid against one another, sending tips to one of Jito's special tip accounts. The lowest tip is 10,000 lamports (0.00001 SOL, which is less than one-tenth of a cent when SOL is trading at $80). However, for valuable opportunities tips are significantly higher, as the searcher is essentially bidding on who gets there first for an opportunity like buying SOL on one exchange and selling it on another at a slight premium. The tip goes to the validator and, through JitoSOL- Jito's liquid staking token- to the stakers. Since Jito's Solana validator client has been installed by the vast majority of Solana nodes over the years, the bulk of JitoSOL stakers receive tips, and as of the end of Q2 2026, Jito Tips were the bulk of validator tips on Solana.
One notable decision here: Jito turned off its public mempool - i.e. the waiting room of transactions before they get into a block in March 2024 - to stop sandwich bots from using it to front-run regular users' swap transactions.
How Jito Compares to Ethereum's MEV Stack
The above process is similar to Flashbots on Ethereum, where searchers send bundles to block builders under the proposer-builder separation model in which validators delegate block construction to block builders for inclusion into their own blocks. Jito adapted the model to a network that doesn't have a public mempool and runs on 400ms blocks, meaning the entire auction process must take a small fraction of 12ms. The economics are the same: private bidding for priority ordering, but on Solana it is the type of MEV where a price is stale within a second.
To put that in perspective, if SOL is trading at $80 on an Orca liquidity pool and $80.20 on a Raydium liquidity pool after someone makes a large swap, a searcher runs an arb bot that creates a bundle of two transactions to buy on Orca and sell on Raydium that includes a 0.005 SOL tip and the next best bot in the auction bids 0.006 SOL to include the same bundle, then the bundle with 0.006 SOL is included first and the arb opportunity is gone. This is not a race of who spam's transactions the most, it's a race of who bids more.
Why Bundles and Tips Matter
This changed the nature of the MEV race prior to Jito, when searchers were sending duplicate transactions (spam) to all leaders to try and win block space and that was one of the drivers of Solana's congestion during 2022-2024. Moving the process from "spam all nodes" to a single, off-chain bidding system reduces congestion and converts MEV (value extracted from ordering transactions) into revenue that goes back to validators and JitoSOL stakers rather than as pure waste. If you hold JitoSOL you have part of your staking revenue come from tips.
However, this also introduces centralization since almost all transaction ordering now goes through one company and Jito serves as both a trust and a failure point on Solana, which markets itself as a neutral chain. Similarly, the Jito auctioning system doesn't just create efficiency for good forms of MEV (like arbitrage) but also for bad MEV. Jito's "answer" to this is their Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-based Binary Atomic Mempool (BAM) system that will allow validators to validate what Jito sends as being "fair", but that is an ongoing development.
