Jito Labs Raises $10M Series A Funding Round

Published on: 12.08.2022

Jito Labs, the first MEV Infrastructure Company building high-performance systems to scale Solana and maximize validator rewards raises $10M in a Series A Funding Round.

Jito Labs is extremely excited to announce it has raises a $10M Series A funding round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Framework Ventures.

With participation from other leading investors Alameda Research, Solana Ventures, Delphi Digital, MGNR, Robot Ventures and 18decimal. Notable angels Anatoly Yakovenko, Brian Long, Armani Ferrante, Austin Federa, Edgar Pavlovsky, and Nitesh Nath also participated in the round. This brings our total funding to $12.1M.

Jito Labs plan to use the new capital to support recruiting and developing their suite of open source tools to enhance the Solana network.

The platforms been hard at work building tools to improve MEV transparency and efficiency. A month ago, we released a blog post on the first MEV Dashboard for Solana. They have also been testing the first third-party validator client for Solana, Jito-Solana. Several thousand bundles and millions of transactions have run through our Block Engine on testnet in preparation for mainnet launch.

Jito Labs dive in to its products in more detail. These products have been designed with the intention of enabling a more efficient network and a better user experience for all users of the Solana network.

Jito-Solana

Jito-Solana is standing on the shoulders of giants — Solana Labs. They have modified the Solana Labs validator client to allow validators to efficiently collect and distribute MEV to their stakers. The validator client supports lists of transactions (bundles) which gives searchers and high frequency traders the flexibility in expressing transaction ordering. It tightly integrates with the relayer and our block engine to improve the network performance for all.

Setting it up is as simple as downloading our validator client and passing the closest Block Engine URL on the command line.

Relayer

The relayer provides a layer of protection between your validator’s transaction processing unit and spam from the network. The relayer works seamlessly with UDP and QUIC and allows one to separate receiving and verification of packets from the transaction processing inside your validator. Run your own or use our hosted version.

Block Engine

In the block engine, we run a high frequency sealed bid auction for access to state. At the auction expiration, we send the most profitable bundles to the leader to be executed immediately. The Block Engine is globally distributed to ensure that validators and searchers get low latency access wherever they are.

Searcher tools — Mempool and ShredStream

Searchers need the best tools to efficiently run MEV operations, and our first two products in this category are the Jito Mempool and ShredStream.

Searchers can subscribe to accounts of interest from the mempool and atomically extract MEV using bundles. Which get executed sequentially and atomically on Jito-Solana clients. This turns MEV on Solana from reactive to proactive, allowing searchers to atomically capture MEV and minimize the incentive for searchers to spam.

ShredStream runs on all of the Jito-Solana clients and sends shreds directly to the locally connected Block Engine. Searchers can access shreds forwarded by leaders and reduce latency by hundreds of milliseconds by signing up for ShredStream.

MEV Payment & Distribution

Our MEV payment system provides custody-free claiming and distribution of MEV to your stakers in an airdrop-style fashion. This enables the MEV profit sharing mentioned in MEV 2.0: The Rise of MPSVs written by Ali at Reciprocal Ventures.

Jito Labs are looking forward to validators and MEV searchers leveraging its products to unlock an efficient marketplace for MEV, increase the decentralization of Solana, and allow validators and stake pools to share MEV with their stakers.