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Validators on Solana are charging traders up to $4,000 a month for early access to pending transaction data — and a new investigation says the practice runs deeper than anyone publicly knew.
The probe, carried out by Andrei Vacariu of Corvus Labs, traced the money flow through a vault managed by Everstake, one of Solana’s biggest validator operations. Everstake, which is led by former Grayscale executive David Kinitsky, sells private data feeds that give paying customers a look at transactions before they clear on-chain. The price tag: $4,000 per month. And Everstake’s sales team is apparently not done growing the network — they’ve been recruiting additional validators into the arrangement, dangling payments of more than 10 SOL (roughly $1,000) a month to bring them on board. The service itself runs through a platform called Blockspace, which markets what it calls “stake-weighted quality of service” to clients who can afford it.
Not cheap. Not subtle.
How Front-Running Works Here
For anyone who’s spent time in DeFi, the mechanics aren’t hard to follow. If you know a large trade is about to hit a decentralized exchange before it actually settles, you can position ahead of it — buying before the price moves, then selling into the impact. That’s front-running. The nastier version is a sandwich attack, where a bot places one order before a victim’s trade and another right after, squeezing profit out of the spread. Both strategies eat directly into returns for ordinary traders who have no idea it’s happening.
Vacariu’s findings put a sharp edge on something Solana users probably didn’t want confirmed: any of them could end up routed through a validator that’s selling their traffic. There’s no way to tell which validators are sharing data and which aren’t. You can’t opt out of something you can’t see.
Solana was actually built to avoid exactly this kind of problem. Unlike Ethereum and most other chains, Solana has no public mempool — the waiting room where unconfirmed transactions sit in plain view before a block is produced. On Solana, transactions go straight to the validator scheduled to produce the next block, theoretically cutting off the MEV bots that feast on mempool visibility. It seemed like a clean design choice. But it’s created something arguably worse: a private market for the same data, accessible only to those writing big checks.
39 Validators, 50 Million SOL
Everstake isn’t a lone actor here. The investigation found it sits at the center of a group of 39 validators. Together, that group has more than 50 million SOL staked — a serious chunk of the network. Everstake alone holds roughly 7.4 million SOL in its node.
The payouts from Blockspace’s revenue-sharing wallet have already reached several names in the ecosystem. Staking Facilities reportedly pulled in more than 950 SOL since July. Prostaking allegedly collected over 200 SOL. RockawayX and Stake.org are also named as recipients. These aren’t trivial sums, and the numbers make clear why validators keep signing up.
Everstake says it uses filtering mechanisms to block front-running and similar exploitation. The company’s position is that the service doesn’t enable the exact abuses critics are pointing at. But the investigation doesn’t really buy that framing. When customers can mirror live transaction traffic to Everstake’s servers and act on it before trades fully process, the line between “data access” and “front-running infrastructure” gets pretty blurry.
Other major players in Solana’s validator set are also running MEV infrastructure, the report says, though through different technical setups. So it’s not purely an Everstake story — it’s probably a structural one.
What This Means for Regular Traders
The uncomfortable truth for anyone trading on Solana’s DeFi layer is that the network’s architecture, which was supposed to protect them, has kind of flipped. The absence of a public mempool didn’t kill MEV. It just moved it behind a paywall and handed the keys to validators with enough stake to make the service worth selling.
That’s a two-tier system in practice. Traders who can afford $4,000 a month get a real edge. Everyone else trades blind, potentially getting sandwiched by bots running on data they paid to access indirectly through transaction fees. The irony is rough.
Vacariu’s work at Corvus Labs keeps pulling on threads that the broader Solana community has mostly left alone. The financial incentives driving validators toward these arrangements are large enough that the behavior is unlikely to stop on its own. Everstake’s recruitment push — actively seeking more validators to join the Blockspace revenue-sharing arrangement — suggests the network is still expanding, not contracting.
Staking Facilities received more than 950 SOL from the wallet since July. Prostaking got over 200 SOL. The wallet keeps paying out.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly are Solana validators selling for $4,000 a month?
They’re selling private data feeds of pending transactions — pre-execution trade data — through a platform called Blockspace, giving paying clients a window to act on trades before they settle on-chain.
How many validators are involved in the Everstake-linked arrangement?
The investigation found 39 validators in the group, with a combined stake of over 50 million SOL; Everstake alone holds approximately 7.4 million SOL.
Why It Matters
The sale of transaction data by Solana validators raises significant concerns regarding market fairness and transparency, as it potentially creates an uneven playing field for traders. This practice could lead to increased scrutiny from regulators, as the commodification of transaction data may violate principles of equitable access in cryptocurrency markets. Furthermore, the involvement of major players like Everstake highlights the potential for conflicts of interest within the validator ecosystem, which could undermine trust in the overall network.
