Jito bundler breaks amid record demand

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Jito, the Solana outfit whose software currently drives a majority of the blockchain’s income, experienced a “system-wide outage” this morning. 

The outage affected Jito bundles which process multiple transactions in one go and are popular with traders looking to do things like arbitrage. Jito’s standstill came one day after it processed a record 15 million bundles in one day, shattering its previous high of 13.9 million. 

Roughly 90% of Solana validators responsible for running the blockchain make use of Jito’s software, so one immediate concern was whether the Solana network itself would experience an outage. However, bundles are just one piece of the Jito-Solana client. Transactions continued to be processed throughout the outage, Jito co-founder Lucas Bruder told me on X.

During what has now been a month of consecutive record-breaking demand for access to the Solana blockchain, Jito and other key pieces of Solana infrastructure have strained to process the load. 

Alongside the all-time high in bundles, Jito MEV tips, which are extra fees paid by traders hoping to get their transaction prioritized, are currently roughly double what they were even during the memecoin craze of this summer. Yesterday, users paid some $6.2 million in extra MEV tips to validators.

Jito validators started complaining of performance issues at around 4:00 Wednesday morning, but the outage was declared at 9:30 am, and bundles started working again by 11 am. Solana DeFi protocols Jupiter and Save both had features break during the Jito outage.

Jito made a Telegram channel in late October to update customers on its block engine, the piece of software that reorders transactions to order Jito blocks as lucratively as possible. The chat shows Jito has had two other system issues since Saturday. 

For some Solana watchers, the incident was an interesting experiment in what the blockchain’s fee markets would do without Jito’s infrastructure. Blockworks Research analyst Dan Smith posted a chart showing that during Jito’s outage, the blockchain’s median priority fee briefly jumped. That means that while Jito was down, it essentially became more expensive to land transactions on the blockchain. The median fee went back down when Jito started working again.

“Pretty cool … the theory actually works in practice,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko wrote in response. Jito is a bit slower and more reliable than run of the mill transaction fees, Yakovenko added. Some transaction senders pay a premium for this reliability, and this serves to “actually lower the median fees for everyone else,” Yakovenko said.

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