What Is Jito? MEV, Tips, and Liquid Staking on Solana

If you have spent any time trading on Solana, you have probably seen the word "Jito" thrown around in trading groups, fee breakdowns, and staking dashboards. The confusing part is that "Jito" refers to two fairly different things at once: a piece of MEV infrastructure that most of the network runs, and a liquid staking product with its own token. This guide explains both in plain language, why active traders and snipers keep bumping into the name, and the honest takeaway for a normal trader who just wants their swaps to go through.

Two things people call "Jito"

When someone says "Jito," they usually mean one of two things, and it helps to separate them right away:

• Jito's MEV infrastructure. This is the part that touches every trade. It includes a modified Solana validator client (commonly called Jito-Solana), an off-chain service called the block engine, and the concepts of bundles and tips. This is what helps transactions land in a specific order, especially when the network is busy.
• jitoSOL liquid staking and the JTO token. This is a separate product. You stake SOL, you get a liquid token called jitoSOL in return, and that token also captures a share of MEV rewards. JTO is the related governance token. None of this directly affects how your individual swap lands.

Both come from the same team and ecosystem, which is why the name does double duty. The first half is infrastructure that trading bots and power users care about. The second half is a staking choice that any SOL holder can make. We will take them one at a time.

What MEV is, in one minute

MEV stands for "maximal extractable value." It is the extra value someone can capture by controlling the order of transactions in a block. On Solana, blocks are produced quickly, and within any block there is a question of which transactions go first, second, and so on. That ordering matters. If a large buy is about to push a token's price up, getting in right before it is worth money. If a price is briefly out of line across two pools, an arbitrage trade that lands first captures the gap.

MEV is not inherently good or bad. Some of it, like arbitrage that keeps prices aligned across pools, is healthy for the market. Some of it, like front-running a regular user's trade, works against you. For our purposes, the key point is simple: because ordering has value, there needs to be a fair, fast way to decide it. That is the gap Jito's infrastructure fills. If you want the deeper version, our Solana MEV deep dive covers how extraction actually works on-chain, and MEV protection explained walks through how to defend your trades against the harmful kinds.

Bundles, tips, and the block engine

Jito's MEV infrastructure adds a layer on top of normal Solana transaction sending. Three terms do most of the work here.

The block engine is an off-chain service that runs a fast auction. Instead of every transaction racing into a block on its own, searchers (the people and bots looking for MEV) can submit their work to this auction, and the engine decides which submissions get forwarded to the validator that is currently producing a block. The auction is designed to favor the submissions that pay the most for the space they use.

Bundles are groups of transactions, up to five, that are meant to execute together, in a specific order, inside the same block. The defining feature is that a bundle is atomic: either all of the transactions in it land, or none of them do. If any one fails, the whole bundle is reverted. For a trader, that "all or nothing" property is the appeal. You can express something like "do this buy, but only if this other step also succeeds in the same block," and you will not get stuck halfway through.

Tips are how you bid in the auction. A Jito tip is a small SOL payment included in your bundle that goes toward the validators participating in the system. A higher tip generally improves your bundle's chances of winning a spot, because the auction ranks submissions by how much they pay relative to the compute they consume. Tips have a small minimum and scale up from there based on how competitive the moment is.

Put together: a searcher builds a bundle, attaches a tip, and sends it to the block engine. The engine runs its auction, picks the highest-paying combination that fits the block, and forwards the winners to the validator producing the slot. If you want a trading-focused breakdown of this exact flow, see Jito bundles for traders.

How tips relate to priority fees

This trips a lot of people up, because Solana already has a mechanism for paying to get included faster: priority fees. So how is a Jito tip different, and do you need both?

A priority fee is paid through Solana's own built-in scheduler. It raises the likelihood that the network includes your transaction during congestion, but it does not give you fine control over ordering relative to other people's transactions. We cover this in detail in Solana priority fees explained.

A Jito tip is a bid in the off-chain block-engine auction. Rather than nudging the general scheduler, it competes directly against other bundles for a precise spot and ordering in the block. That makes it more deterministic for ordering, which is exactly what someone doing arbitrage or trying to land ahead of a price move wants.

The honest answer to "do I need both" is: for competitive, order-sensitive trades, both usually matter. A big tip with a weak priority fee can still fail to land; a solid priority fee with no competitive tip can lose the auction. They are not interchangeable knobs; they act on different parts of the system. The good news for a normal trader is that you rarely have to balance these by hand, which we will get to below.

Why snipers and active traders care

If you are buying a token at launch, or trying to enter the moment liquidity is added, you are in a crowded, time-sensitive race. Dozens of other bots may be trying to do the exact same thing in the exact same block. Two properties of Jito's infrastructure matter a lot in that race.

First, ordering control. Landing your buy in the right position can be the difference between a good fill and buying the top of a spike that other people created. Bundles plus tips give a way to compete for that position instead of leaving it to chance.

Second, atomicity. Sniping often involves more than one step, and a partial execution can leave you in a bad spot, for example holding a position you could not complete the way you intended. Because a bundle is all-or-nothing, you avoid the worst "stuck halfway" outcomes. If you are specifically interested in launch sniping, our guide on how to snipe Pump.fun launches goes into the mechanics, and this infrastructure is part of why landing reliably is hard to do well by hand.

The takeaway is that the people who obsess over Jito tips and bundles are, for the most part, running competitive automated strategies. For them, a few lamports of tip and a few milliseconds of ordering are worth real money. That is a very different situation from a casual trader making a handful of swaps a day.

jitoSOL and the JTO token

Now the second meaning of "Jito," which has nothing to do with how your swap lands. jitoSOL is a liquid staking token. The idea behind liquid staking is that normally, staking your SOL locks it up. With a liquid staking token, you deposit SOL into a stake pool and receive a token (here, jitoSOL) that represents your staked position. You keep something liquid that you can hold, move, or use in DeFi, while the underlying SOL stays staked and earning. If you are new to staking in general, start with how to stake Solana.

What makes jitoSOL specific is that, on top of normal staking rewards, it is designed to also capture a share of the MEV rewards generated through Jito's infrastructure. In other words, some of the value created by those tips and bundles flows back to people holding the liquid staking token, and it compounds automatically. That is the connection between the two halves of "Jito": the MEV machine produces value, and the staking product routes a portion of it to stakers. We will not put a number on the size of that boost here, because it varies with network activity over time.

JTO is the related governance token. At a high level, it lets holders take part in decisions about the protocol and how its treasury is managed. It is a governance role first and foremost, not a guaranteed payout. This article is not a recommendation to buy jitoSOL or JTO; it is just describing what they are so the vocabulary stops being confusing. As always, staking and tokens carry their own risks, and you should make your own decisions.

How MoonHydra fits

Here is the practical part for a regular trader: you mostly benefit from this infrastructure indirectly, and you should not have to think about tips, bundles, or auctions to make a trade.

MoonHydra is a non-custodial Solana trading bot, and one of the things it handles for you is the messy work of getting your transaction to land server-side. You tell it what you want to buy or sell; the infrastructure side of actually landing that transaction reliably is managed for you behind the scenes. We keep this deliberately general, because the right way to land a trade depends on the moment, and the value of a good bot is that it abstracts those decisions away rather than handing you a pile of knobs.

A few things stay fixed no matter what is happening under the hood. MoonHydra is non-custodial, so you keep control of your funds; your keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Swaps route through Jupiter for pricing and execution, and there are no custom smart contracts in the path. Pricing is a flat 1% per trade on both buys and sells, with no subscription. The point of all of this is that the Jito-style complexity discussed above is exactly the kind of thing you should not have to manage yourself.

Bottom line

"Jito" is two things wearing one name. The first is MEV infrastructure, the validator client, block engine, bundles, and tips, which together decide how transactions land and in what order, and which matter enormously to competitive snipers and bots. The second is jitoSOL liquid staking plus the JTO governance token, a separate product that lets you stake SOL, stay liquid, and capture a share of MEV rewards. The two are connected, but they solve different problems. For a normal trader, the honest summary is this: you do not need to master tips and bundles to trade well; you need execution that handles them for you, and you mostly enjoy the benefit indirectly.

Next: read Solana priority fees explained for the other half of how trades get included, see MEV protection explained to understand the defensive side, and when you want execution that handles the landing for you, try MoonHydra at t.me/moonhydrabot.