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Jito, a Solana-based outfit that produces the software which generates most of the revenue from the blockchain, recently experienced a “system-wide outage” This morning,
Jito bundles, which are used by traders to perform arbitrage and process several transactions at once, were affected. Jito’s halt came a day after the company processed 15 million bundles, a new record.
Jito is the software used by approximately 90% of Solana validaters, who are responsible for the running of the blockchain. Therefore, the immediate question was whether or not the Solana system itself would be affected. Bundles are only one part of Jito’s Solana client. Lucas Bruder, Jito’s co-founder told me that transactions continued to be handled throughout the outage.
Jito, and the other pieces of Solana’s infrastructure that are critical to its operation have been struggling to keep up with the demand.
Jito tips, the extra fee paid by traders to prioritize their transactions, have also reached an all-time record high. They are roughly two times higher than they were during this summer’s memecoin frenzy. Users paid $6.2 Million in MEV Tips to Validators yesterday.
Validators began complaining about performance problems at 4:00 am on Wednesday, but an outage was declared by 9:30 and the bundles were working again at 11am. Solana DeFi Protocols Jupiter and Save were both affected by the Jito Outage.
Jito created a Telegram Channel in October for its customers to keep them updated on the block engine. This is the software which reorders all transactions so that Jito blocks are ordered as profitably as possible. Jito’s chat indicates that the system has been experiencing two more issues since Saturday.
Some Solana observers saw the incident as an experiment to see what would happen to the blockchain fee markets without Jito’s infrastructure. Blockworks Research’s Dan Smith shared a graph showing how the blockchain’s priority fee spiked briefly during Jito’s downtime. This means that, while Jito wasn’t working properly, the cost of landing transactions onto the blockchain increased. When Jito began working again, the median fee dropped.
“Pretty cool … the theory actually works in practice,” Anatoly Yakovenko responded. Yakovenko said that Jito was a little slower but more reliable. Some senders of transactions pay more for reliability. “actually lower the median fees for everyone else,” Yakovenko remarked.
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