Solana MEV in 2026: Block Builders, Jobs and Investor Signals

Here's a strange thing about Solana in 2026. The network is busier than ever, yet the money that used to flow from "who goes first" has shrunk. That isn't a bad sign. It's the sign of a market growing up, and it's creating some of the best-paid, most interesting jobs in the whole ecosystem.

Why transaction order matters

Every Solana block is a queue. Whoever controls that queue can decide who trades first, who gets the better price, and who gets squeezed. That's what people mean by MEV: the value that comes from ordering transactions.

For years most of that value went through tips paid to validators running the Jito client. Some of it came from sandwich bots, which buy just before your trade and sell just after, pocketing the gap. Bitquery counted about 6.85 million sandwich attacks on Solana between October 2025 and early October 2026, taking roughly $29.7 million before costs, nearly all of it from Pump.fun memecoin buyers.

The big question for 2026: can Solana make ordering fairer without killing the business? So far, yes.

Jito: lower tips, bigger bets

Jito Labs is still the best-known name here, and its numbers tell the story of the year. According to the Blockworks Advisory report for Q2 2026, Jito's protocol revenue fell for a fifth straight quarter, from a peak of $26.1 million in Q1 2025 to $1.28 million. Tips processed halved to $9.9 million in Q2, while transaction count held steady at about 1.045 billion.

Read that again. Same traffic, much less tip money. Solana fees are shifting towards in-protocol priority fees, and Jito has chosen to give up short-term tip revenue for a cleaner trading environment. It has done this before, back in 2024, when it shut its public mempool because it enabled sandwiches.

The bets it's making instead:

• BAM, its block assembly marketplace, which uses secure hardware to keep transactions private until they're ordered. Stake running BAM doubled from about 14% to 28% in Q1, and Jito says BAM validators covered over 34% of stake by September.
• Preconfirmations, a paid early stream of what a validator has committed to execute. Trading desks pay for the head start, and revenue splits 35% to BAM validators, 35% to the Jito DAO and 30% to distributors. First payouts arrive this month.
• JTX, its own self-custody trading app, which opened publicly in July.

My take: this is a team swapping one fragile revenue line for three products it controls. That's a sensible trade, but it's early, and investors should watch whether BAM plugins and preconfirmations actually bring in money over the next two quarters.

Temporal and Harmonic: the challenger

The biggest change in 2026 is that Jito now has a serious rival. Temporal, the New York firm behind the HumidiFi prop AMM and the Nozomi transaction-sending service, built Harmonic, an open block-building system.

Harmonic's pitch is that validators, not Harmonic, choose how their blocks are built. They can run a 50ms batch auction, plain first-in first-out ordering, a revenue-maximising strategy, or a custom one. The batch and FIFO options meet the Solana Foundation's delegation rules. At the time of writing, Harmonic's own explorer shows 86 validators and about 30% of all Solana stake, with names like Figment, Kraken, Coinbase, Jupiter and Drift on the list.

On 27 October Temporal named Michael Marcantonio, formerly Head of DeFi at Galaxy Digital, as CEO. He's said the firm will expand into on-chain perps, prediction markets, options and structured products, though no products or dates have been announced yet.

Two strong builders competing for validators is great news. It pushes both to pay validators more, protect users better and ship faster.

The landing and routing layer

Underneath the block builders sits a busy layer of teams that get transactions into blocks quickly and safely:

• Astralane sells fast transaction routing, MEV protection and shred streaming to trading firms. It says 72% of transactions land in the target slot and 96% within one slot. There's no public funding round reported, but it's hiring frontend, backend and finance people in Bengaluru, which is a nice reminder that these jobs aren't only in New York.
• DFlow works on order flow and now powers a prediction markets API that brings Kalshi markets on-chain. It isn't listing open roles right now, so it's one to follow rather than apply to today.
• Jito, the network side behind JitoSOL, earns steady staking fees that now make up most of its revenue and cushion the swings in tips.

Add October's Alpenglow upgrade, which cut finality to around 150 milliseconds, and the whole layer is being rebuilt for a faster chain. That means more engineering work, not less.

Who's hiring and what it pays

This corner of Solana pays very well, because the skills are rare. The published ranges right now:

• Temporal lists a Systems Engineer for transaction landing and a Platform Engineer for core systems, both at $200,000 to $350,000 base plus equity. Its Senior Product Engineer role pays $200,000 to $250,000 and says no crypto background is needed. New York is preferred, with US remote for strong fits.
• Jito Labs has four open roles, including two senior security engineers at $180,000 to $200,000 and a senior software engineer for JTX at $180,000 to $225,000, all with token or equity incentives. The product security role is remote. Its team says it's gone from one main product line to four, which is exactly why it's hiring.

The common thread is Rust, low-latency systems, Linux and networking. If you've worked in high-frequency trading, game networking or kernel performance, you're closer to these jobs than you might think.

How to get in

Practical steps that actually help:

1. Learn the transaction lifecycle. Know how a Solana transaction moves from wallet to leader to block. Read the Harmonic and BAM docs end to end. They're clear and free.
2. Build something measurable. A small tool that tracks landing rates or spots sandwiches across slots is a far better portfolio piece than a certificate.
3. Show your latency work. Hiring managers here care about microseconds. A write-up showing how you cut a delay, with numbers, will get read.
4. Don't ignore non-engineering roles. Security, product, finance and validator relations all sit around this layer and are growing too.

The investor angle

For investors, the signal isn't tip volume any more. Watch three things: how much stake moves between BAM and Harmonic, whether preconfirmations and plugins turn into real recurring revenue, and whether Temporal's planned move into derivatives actually ships. Falling tips plus steady traffic means users are keeping more of their money. Over time, that's what brings bigger traders and bigger institutions to Solana.

I'm optimistic. Fairer ordering, faster finality and real competition is a much healthier base than a market built on bots. Browse more Trading and MEV teams and the wider Infrastructure category, or go straight to the source at Jito, Temporal and Harmonic.

What to do next

If you're job hunting or investing, start with the teams above and explore the full Solana Teams directory to find who's growing. And if you're building in block building, transaction landing or trading infrastructure, list your team on Solana Teams so the right people can find you.