Quants are paying $4,000 a month to front-run Solana trades
According to a new investigation, validators are accepting payments starting at 10 SOL ($1,000) a month to leak early access to Solana trades they receive for block production. Maximal extractable value (MEV) is on allegedly sale to quants via an incredibly valuable, realtime feed of pre-execution transactions. Corvus Labs’ Andrei Vacariu traced payouts through a vault where Everstake, led by former Grayscale founding general manager David Kinitsky, sells a $4,000/month private data feed of pending trades. He also claimed that Everstake salespeople are soliciting more validator node operators to join the scheme with offers of over 10 SOL a month. With this valuable information, sophisticated traders can allegedly front-run and sandwich-attack common orders on DeFi exchanges. ‘Every trader on Solana’ Vacariu spelled out the implications of his allegation for average users of Solana applications: “Every trader on Solana hits these slots, can’t tell which le...