Solana Has Emerged as a Leader in Blockchain Infrastructure, Attracting Attention for Both Its Speed and the Breadth of Its Decentralized Financial Applications

Solana has quickly risen as a leader in blockchain infrastructure, gaining attention for both the speed of its network and the breadth of its decentralized financial applications.

As competition in the staking and MEV landscape intensifies, new solutions like Jito Foundation are presenting innovative approaches to charting the future of the validator economy.

At TOKEN2049 Dubai, BeInCrypto interviewed Brian Smith, Executive Director at Jito Foundation, to discuss Jito’s strategy, its place at the heart of Solana’s MEV infrastructure, and the pivotal choices underpinning their continued growth.

Smith oversees Jito’s products and governance, including its liquid staking solution JitoSol, restaking initiatives, and MEV tooling. At the interview, he shared his views on decentralization, building trust, responsible MEV participation, and fostering institutional adoption to drive Solana’s DeFi ecosystem forward.

This conversation offers a close look at how Jito tackles network scalability, transparency, governance, and the introduction of disruptive primitives while focusing on sustainable value for the community.

Jito’s Role in the Solana Validator Economy and MEV Innovation

I think that Jito is just the core infrastructure for the economic engine of Solana. And you see this across a few products with the original kind of MEV product that was completely novel for Solana at the time.

Then also the leading stake pool, Jito Sol, that helps distribute staking rewards as well as MEV rewards to stakers, and now restaking, which is kind of a third layer on top. So as you see, just economic value flows across Solana, then Jito wants to be on the cutting edge of helping to power that in the most decentralized way possible.

Specifically on the MEV side, the product has worked quite well. It’s distributed over $1 billion in value to stakers and validators to help secure the network and a revenue stream that didn’t really exist when it was launched. And so personally, that’s been really, really interesting to see.

It has 95% of network adoption, but the Solana market is evolving quite rapidly, mostly in response to just how successful Solana has been. So volumes are consistently at all time highs. The most volume of any network in crypto, which is incredible.

And we see a lot of new technologies and new strategies being deployed on-chain. I personally think that it’s critical for Solana’s MEV infrastructure to stay ahead of that and continue to evolve. That looks like making the software more transparent so that everyone can kind of see how these transactions, specifically Jito executed or submitted transactions, are being prioritised.

And then also more attribution about what validators are doing. And so that’s really the critical idea, is just continuing to innovate on Solana and improving the transparency of the system while continuing to provide best in class rewards for all constituents on Solana.

JitoSOL and Liquid Staking: Differentiators, Growth, and DeFi Integration

JitoSol today is the largest LST on Solana by a decent share, with 17.5 million Sol, which is a little over $2.5 billion of TVL.

And I think it’s innovated in a few ways. It has best in class DeFi penetration in terms, there’s a lot of LSTs on Solana given its interesting market structure, but it’s quite fragmented. And so a lot of those are usable in some liquid staking protocol or some DeFi protocols, not others.

So JitoSol has by far the deepest liquidity, which is really critical given liquidity is one of the main benefits of LSTs. And then I also think it is just like the level of institutional preparation that has been in JitoSol. And so it has a system that autonomously does all of the delegation.

It is completely managed by the DAO in a trustless way. And so it has just much more resiliency, which is something that when we talk to institutional clients thinking about how they should allocate their stake, they’re really prioritising. So we think that there’s going to be a next wave of growth of holders of Solana that have historically used native staking that will be coming into liquid staking because of these attributes and choosing JitoSol for that.

I think JITO SOL should continue to grow as the number one asset in all of Solana DeFi.

So when new liquidity pairs are established on AMM, it should be paired with JITO SOL instead of SOL because you get that yield bearing aspect, which is just uniformly better. And so I think it will continue to grow its penetration. It’s the largest token in most DeFi protocols today.

And then I think the other thing is kind of how we merge the new institutional players I referenced earlier into liquid staking, specifically onboarding them instead of native staking and then moreover, getting them as users of Solana DeFi, which is really an opportunity to grow the market by many multiples.

Restaking: Capital Efficiency and Disruptive Potential