Quants are paying $4,000 a month to front-run Solana trades

Corvus Labs researcher Andrei Vacariu alleges Everstake sells a private data feed of pending Solana trades for $4,000 a month. The investigation says the firm also solicits other validators to join a network leaking early access to those trades. Payouts traced through a Blockspace vault show validators allegedly accepting payments starting at 10 SOL ($1,000) monthly to share pre-execution transaction data.

The claim challenges Solana’s network design, which lacks a public mempool. Transactions typically travel directly to the scheduled validator, a structure intended to minimize extractable value. Vacariu argues this architecture has instead consolidated the opportunity into a paid service. By mirroring incoming traffic to their servers before a block is produced, customers can rush transactions ahead of or immediately after retail orders, enabling front-running and sandwich attacks.

Everstake, which describes itself as an association of 39 validators with more than 50 million SOL staked, rejects the characterization. The company claims it uses “filtering mechanisms specifically to prevent this type of activity” and does not encourage front-running. This denial sits alongside documents showing Staking Facilities, a separate firm, has collected more than 950 SOL in revenue-share payments from the Blockspace vault since July. Prostaking has also collected over 200 SOL.

Vacariu highlights the inability of ordinary users to participate in or escape this system. He states that “Every trader on Solana hits these slots, can’t tell which leaders mirror their traffic, and can’t opt out.” With SOL trading at $98.96 and 24-hour volume exceeding $3.2 billion, the investigation points to a structural shift in how trade execution occurs on the network. The discrepancy between Everstake’s stated prevention measures and the recorded payouts to rival validators remains a central point of contention in the report.