What Is Jito? Breaking Down Solana’s MEV Rewards, Tips, and Staking System

If you’re holding SOL and you’d like to generate passive income from it, then JITO is a liquid staking DeFi protocol worth exploring. Even if you’re already staking, there may be extra income you are missing out on, thanks to Jito’s MEV marketplace and rewards.

Here you’ll find out exactly what Jito is, what MEV is, the difference between native and liquid staking, how you can earn higher APYs, and the way that Jito provides enhanced rewards and increased safety against sandwich attacks.

Jito Liquid Staking Key Facts and Features:

• Protocol Overview: Jito is a liquid staking protocol on Solana with a Total Value Locked (TVL) exceeding $1.2 billion, making it a significant component of the network's DeFi ecosystem.
• Yield Composition: The protocol's APY, which has historically fluctuated in the 6-8% range, is generated from two sources: standard staking inflation rewards and a share of MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) tips.
• MEV Risk Mitigation: Jito's architecture routes transactions through a private Block Engine, a method designed to mitigate the risk of common MEV exploits like sandwich attacks.
• Liquid Staking Token: Staking SOL through the protocol mints JitoSOL, a liquid token that represents the staked capital plus accrued rewards and can be used in other DeFi applications.

What is Jito?

Jito is Solana's largest liquid staking platform that combines two powerful features:

1. Liquid Staking - Stake your SOL tokens, earn rewards, and still use your staked SOL for other DeFi activities
2. MEV Marketplace - An organized market for MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) that generates additional rewards

Jito stakes your SOL across multiple validators on Solana and operates an MEV marketplace, allowing you to collect both staking and MEV rewards.

With $2.6 billion in total value locked (TVL) as of June 2025, Jito is the biggest staking platform on Solana and the second-largest liquid staking platform across all blockchains.

When you stake with Jito, you receive JitoSOL tokens that represent your staked position plus your accumulated rewards.

The JTO token powers the broader Jito ecosystem and is used for governance.

Jito - An MEV Marketplace

We'll get deeper into the details of MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) shortly, but for now, MEV tips are payments made by traders, dApps, and bots, who want their transactions processed in a specific order to capture profitable opportunities.

Think of MEV tips like a priority access pass in a theme park. Most people just wait in line, but some are willing to pay a little extra to jump the queue.

That extra payment - the MEV tip - goes to validators, who prioritize those transactions in return. A portion of that tip is shared with users who stake through Jito, rewarding them for supporting the network.

Understanding Native and Liquid Staking

What is Staking? (Quick Staking 101 Guide)

Staking allows you to earn money from a token or coin that you hold. But how?

With staking, you:

1. Buy a crypto such as ETH or SOL
2. Lock it up to help secure the network or protocol
3. Receive rewards - often called ‘passive income’

It's a bit like receiving interest from a bank on money you’ve deposited.

How do you receive rewards?

Staking is done through validators. A validator helps to verify transactions on the blockchain and keep it secure, and this is good for everyone. In return, rewards are given.

This type of staking is possible due to the nature of proof-of-stake blockchains, such as Solana and Ethereum.

Why is Native Staking a Good Thing?

As well as allowing you to receive passive income on your crypto, it helps secure the network, keep it decentralized, and protect it from a 51% attack.

A 51% attack can happen if one person or organization has 51% of the tokens. They can then take control of the network. And that leads to all kinds of bad things!

Is There a Downside to Native Staking?

If everyone is staking their crypto, this means their liquidity is stuck, and so there isn’t enough to do other things like DeFi, or take out money if they need it.

So, for at least some of the money on chain, both staking and liquidity are needed. Liquid staking helps this.

Ivy Oracle is a validator that offers native staking. Jito is a staking pool that offers liquid staking.

Regular staking is possible by running a validator node like Ivy Oracle does. However, this requires a minimum amount of SOL and a complex technical setup.

And the validator has to be always up and running and ‘behave well’ (and have good uptime and expensive hardware), otherwise it doesn’t get rewards.

For most people, running a validator is too complicated or costly. And to ensure they earn decent rewards, it's recommended that a validator has at least 3500 SOL to start producing blocks consistently, which at the time of writing, is about $450,000..

“I want to stake, but I don’t want to do all that!”

That’s fine, because you can choose a validator to stake with.

(Choose one with a good uptime and competitive APYs for the best rewards!).

They do the hard work and share the rewards with you.

Or you can stake with a liquid staking pool, like JITO.

Want to get technical? You can read this to learn about the details of being a Solana validator.

Still with us? Ok, so let's clarify something - the meaning of the word ‘Liquid’ in this context.

What Makes Assets "Liquid" in Crypto and Finance?

Simply put, a "liquid" asset can be easily sold or used. Cash is extremely liquid, while a house or expensive artwork is illiquid because it takes time to sell.

Traditional staking locks up your tokens for days during unstaking (usually one epoch on Solana). Liquid staking solves this problem.

How Jito's Liquid Staking Works on Solana

Liquid staking is the second most profitable type of DeFi activity across all blockchains, in terms of TVL and revenue, with a current combined Total Value Locked (TVL) of around $48 billion. That’s big money!

The top liquid staking provider on Solana is Jito, followed by protocols and validators such as Sanctum, Binance, Marinade Finance, and Jupiter.

When you stake SOL with Jito, you receive JitoSOL tokens in return. Think of JitoSOL as a liquid receipt that:

• Proves you own staked SOL
• Automatically accumulates staking rewards
• Can be traded, sold, or used in DeFi immediately
• Is always redeemable for your original SOL plus rewards

This means you get the benefits of staking while keeping your assets liquid for other opportunities.

Jito puts your SOL into a larger liquid staking pool and then distributes it among various high-performing validators on the Solana network. This means you can earn a higher yield from your SOL than native staking alone.

Native Staking vs Liquid Staking

If liquid staking is so good, why would you choose native staking? Well, there are pros and cons to each.

We've already covered the pros of liquid staking.

But let's just sum it up:

Pros of Liquid Staking

1. You can earn higher yields on your crypto
2. Your money is not locked away, so you can use it for DeFi and make more money
3. Your money is available immediately - you don’t need to wait to unstake

Cons of Liquid Staking

These are a little complicated, so we’ll cover them in more detail further down, but here is a bit about the downsides of liquid staking:

1. Smart Contract Risks
2. Protocol Dependency
3. Market Volatility and Depegging
4. Risk of Centralization (51% Attack)

Pros and Cons of Native Staking

Pros of Native Staking

1. Safer as it avoids smart contract vulnerability risks from third-party protocols
2. Less complicated
3. More of a “set it and forget it” type of investment

Downsides of Native Staking

1. Slightly less interest/lower yields
2. Less liquid
3. It can take 3 days to unstake

Decoding Jito MEV - Tips, Bribes, and Bundles

So, what exactly is this MEV that generates extra rewards?

MEV stands for Maximal Extractable Value. In simple terms, it's the maximum possible profit that can be made by strategically inserting, reordering, or choosing which transactions to include within a blockchain block.

If that sounds complicated, think of the theme park analogy. It’s like knowing the most efficient route to hit all the best rides in a theme park with the shortest lines, or even paying a staff member to let you cut the queue.

Problems/Opportunities with MEV

As we’ve seen, there are positive aspects to MEV, but the trouble comes from MEV bots that constantly scan and sometimes take advantage of the blockchain for profitable opportunities.

Profitable/Fair MEV strategies include:

Arbitrage - Noticing a token is cheaper on one decentralized exchange (DEX) than another and executing a buy-and-sell order simultaneously for a guaranteed profit

Liquidations - Being the first to liquidate an under-collateralized loan on a lending platform to claim the reward.

And this is where things get unpleasant:

Harmful MEV strategies - Sandwich Attacks

MEV bots detect a large trade about to happen, then place a buy order before it and a sell order after it.

The bot's first trade drives the price up, forcing the original trader to pay more.

The bot's second trade captures the profit from the price movement they created, 'sandwiching' the victim between the two trades.

How Jito Created an Orderly Marketplace for MEV

Jito Labs saw the problems with MEV as an opportunity. They built a system that sits on top of Solana's normal operations to create an organized and more fair market for this activity.

First, here’s how MEV and Jito work:

Searchers (MEV Bots) - These are the bots we mentioned, operated by sophisticated traders and firms. They are constantly hunting for profitable MEV opportunities.

What is a Jito Bundle? - When a searcher finds a profitable sequence of transactions (like an arbitrage opportunity), they package them together in what Jito calls a bundle. These bundles are processed privately and atomically, meaning they either all execute together or none execute at all, which hides them from searcher bots and helps prevent interference.

What is a Jito Tip? (or Bribes) - To ensure their profitable bundle gets processed quickly and exactly as designed, searchers attach a tip to it. This tip is an extra payment in SOL that incentivizes validators to prioritize their bundle. The higher the tip, aka ‘bribe’, the more likely the bundle gets included in the next block.

Jito-enabled Validators - Validators who run Jito's special, open-source client software can see these bundles and their attached tips. They are incentivized to pick the bundles with the highest tips, process them, and collect the reward.

Essentially, Jito created the infrastructure that allows these tips to happen, bringing what was a hidden activity into a more transparent space.

Want to see more stats about Jitos Bundles, tips, and recent transactions? Take a look at the Jito Explorer.

How Jito Makes MEV More Fair

As we’ve seen, while MEV has benefits, things like sandwich attacks can result in a worse price for an innocent user.

Jito takes several steps to help prevent sandwich attacks.

Jito uses Private Transaction Routing - When you send a transaction through a Jito-enabled application, it doesn't go to a public 'mempool' where bots can see it. This is a space where on-chain transactions are stored before being added to the blockchain. Instead, they go directly to Jito's Block Engine, shielding it from predatory bots until it's included in a block.

This helps prevent sandwich attacks, as bots could exploit transactions stored in the mempool before they were executed

MEV Protect Mode - Some dApps using Jito also use its "MEV Protect Mode," which ensures transactions are sent directly to Jito's block engines, again minimizing the risk of sandwich attacks.

Working with Other Protocols - Jito Labs works with other protocols on various initiatives, including advising on better UI/UX, notifying about MEV leakage, and advising on more accurate pricing mechanisms to allow lower slippage settings.

JITO’s approach to MEV makes Solana better, provides a more efficient user experience, while forming part of an ongoing dialogue around solving MEV exploits, centralization, and fairness in blockchain.

That said, MEV attacks still remain a problem on Solana, Ethereum and various blockchains so more research and innovation are needed.

Liquid Staking Risks to Consider

The downsides lie in the extra risk you take on. Big protocols like Jito help to lessen the risk, but they still remain, so it's worth being aware of.

Main Risks of Liquid Staking

• Smart Contract Risk - This is the most significant risk. When you use Jito, you are interacting with complex smart contracts. While Jito's contracts are heavily audited, there is always a risk of a bug or vulnerability that a hacker could exploit. Also, if you choose to use your JitoSOL for DeFi, there’s a second layer of risk. (As with most DeFi activities)

With native staking, your risk is primarily tied to your chosen validator's performance, not a separate layer of DeFi protocol code. The worst thing that can happen is that your rewards are slashed, then you can simply unstake and choose another validator.

• Protocol Dependency - You are swapping a native blockchain asset (SOL) for a protocol-specific token (JitoSOL). The value and security of JitoSOL are entirely dependent on the health, security, and reliability of the Jito protocol.

Jito works to combat these risks with high-quality engineering and sophisticated monitoring systems like its StakeNet, which ensures the stake is distributed across secure, high-performing validators.

However, the risk of interacting with this extra layer of technology remains.

• Market volatility - while you do have your receipt, in this case, JitoSol, sometimes the value of this asset can change due to complicated market conditions.

For example, the value of stETH (staked Ethereum) temporarily fell below he value of ETH in 2022. This isn’t common, and JitoSOL has never depegged, but it could happen.

• 51% attack - If too many people stake with one staking provider, liquid staking could increase the chances of centralization and collusion, making a blockchain more susceptible to a 51% attack and other problems.

The Payoff - How JITO MEV Rewards Boost Your Staking APY

Now for the most important part: how does all this activity benefit you as a Jito staker?

This is where Jito's two business models, liquid staking and the MEV marketplace, merge perfectly.

The flow of value is simple but powerful. The MEV tips paid by searchers are collected by the Jito-enabled validators. A significant portion of these fees are then passed directly into the Jito liquid staking pool. This pool is where all the SOL from Jito stakers is held.

This means the Jito rewards you earn come from a combination of two sources:

Your Total Jito APY = Base Staking Rewards + MEV Rewards

This injection of MEV tips is the primary reason why liquid staking with Jito can offer a slightly higher yield, aka APY, than native staking alone. You get a cut of the high-frequency trading activity happening on Solana by holding JitoSOL.

Your rewards then get compounded into your JitoSOL tokens, meaning that JitoSOL will be worth more than SOL alone.

More rewards mean more money for stakers. And compounding is essentially money magic!

Jito, Liquid Staking, and MEV - Final Thoughts

Jito's protocols are widely seen as a major innovation for Solana.

Offering liquid staking makes SOL much more attractive for certain holders, increasing the price and demand for the coin, and earning potential.

Jito made their validator client open-source, which was a key step in building trust and encouraging community participation.

And, by creating an open and transparent MEV market with enhanced privacy, Jito’s MEV system reroutes value that might have been captured by predatory bots, thereby protecting users from sandwich attacks.

This returns fees to the validators and stakers who secure the network!

If you’re staking SOL or thinking about getting started, Ivy Oracle makes it simple. It’s a reliable, independent validator with a strong track record, solid uptime, and competitive rewards. You keep control of your assets, avoid smart contract risks, and support the Solana network at the same time.