Solana Validators Caught Selling Early Access to Trades for Thousands

A new investigation has revealed that validators on the Solana network are accepting payments from sophisticated traders to leak early access to trades, allowing them to front-run and sandwich-attack common orders.

The investigation by Corvus Labs' Andrei Vacariu found that Everstake, a validator association with over 50 million $SOL staked, is selling a private data feed of pending trades for $4,000 per month. This feed is allegedly used to gain an edge in the market.

Vacariu claims that this valuable information allows quants to front-run and sandwich-attack common orders on DeFi exchanges, giving them a significant advantage over retail traders. He also notes that average users of Solana applications are unable to opt out of these priority slots, which are dominated by institutional stakeholders.

Everstake has responded to the allegations, stating that it uses filtering mechanisms to prevent front-running and sandwiching, but Vacariu's investigation suggests that this may not be effective. The lack of a public mempool on Solana means that most transactions travel straight to the validator scheduled to build the next block without queueing in any public pool.