8bit0 🏴‍☠️

Good article. The forest has gotten a lot darker this year. Apologies for the long tweet but I have a lot of thoughts as we've seen these trends grow. 1. These services claim no front-running but enforcement is spotty and retroactive. We saw persistent sandwhiching instances from them on popular retail apps that were not corrected until outside intervention. 2. SOL's investment pitch is REV. With these and similar deals, REV capture is structurally declining. The value still exists but it's captured in opaque side deals. Our community should probably rethink REV as a KPI if we accept these as inevitable. It is going down only as these arrangements proliferate. 3. Stakers get screwed. Opaque yield is captured by validator operators or sophisticated institutional stakers that shop their stake to the highest bidder. Average staker doesn't have knowledge or access to this. This further reduces incentive to own SOL. 4. This disadvantages less sophisticated validators and centralizes stake. Each validator builds their own prop trading operation to internalize the profit. Only a handful have enough scale to do it right and capture maximum value. Jito was founded to bring structure to the dark world of Solana MEV capture. The system is transparent, identical for everyone, whether big or small validator, and stakers of any size. The mechanism includes strong protections to prevent info leakage and front-running. In some cases, this structure means slightly less yield. BAM was introduced a year ago as the next generation of block building. It has ~35% of network stake. BAM's design prevents most side deals. It was designed to put the network's user first - that rigidity is actually our biggest blocker from a validator onboarding perspective. Many operators want flexibility for side income they can keep for themselves, despite the impact on our network's lifeblood: users. MCP solves some of these concerns but makes others worse. Regardless, the train has left the station and MCP isn't going to fix it soon. I appreciate Andrei surfacing some of these items. We as a community should make proactive decisions about how we want the network to operate and what our ultimate values our. The status quo is letting it quietly change under the surface: centralized stake, disadvantaged retail stakers, little REV and worse user execution. The window for real discussion is now, otherwise the momentum will be irreversible.