Note to Solana users: Your SOL is being quietly harvested in these ways

PFOF(order-flow payment) has long been a mature business model in traditional finance. It was through this model that Robinhood launched the \"zero-commission trading\" campaign and quickly broke through among many established securities firms. This strategy not only made Robinhood a fortune, but also forced industry giants such as Schwab and E-Trade to follow suit, changing the landscape of the U.S. retail brokerage business.

In 2021 alone, Robinhood earned nearly US$1 billion in revenue through PFOF, accounting for half of its total revenue that year; even in 2025, its PFOF revenue in a single quarter will still reach hundreds of millions of dollars. This shows the huge profits behind this business model.

In traditional markets, market makers strongly prefer orders from retail investors. The reason is simple: retail orders are often considered \"non-toxic\" and are often based on sentiment or immediate demand and do not include accurate predictions of future price movements. By taking these orders, market makers can steadily earn bid-ask spreads without having to worry about becoming counterparties to informed traders (such as large institutions).

Based on this demand, brokerages such as Robinhood package users \'order streams and sell them in bulk to market-making giants like Citadel, receiving huge rebates.

Regulation in traditional financial markets protects retail investors to a certain extent. The SEC\'s National Market System Regulation requires that even orders that are packaged for sale must be executed at a price that is no worse than the best market price.

However, in an unregulated world of chains, applications are taking advantage of information asymmetry to induce users to pay priority fees and tips that far exceed actual chain needs, and quietly withhold these premiums. This kind of behavior is essentially a huge \"hidden tax\" levied on unsuspecting users.

Traffic monetization

For those applications that have a large number of user entrances, the means to monetize traffic are far more abundant than you think.

Front-end applications and wallets can decide where users \'transactions go, how they are completed, and even how fast they are linked. Every \"barrier\" in the life cycle of a transaction hides the business experience of \"eating away\" user value.

\"Sell\" users to market makers

Just like Robinhood, apps on Solana can also sell \"access rights\" to market makers.

The Quotation is a direct expression of this logic. Unlike traditional AMM, RFQs allow users (or applications) to directly request an inquiry and close a deal from a specific market maker. On Solana, aggregators such as Jupiter already integrate this pattern (JupiterZ). In this system, applications can charge connection fees from these market makers, or more directly, package and sell batches of retail order streams. As the price difference on the chain continues to narrow, the author predicts that this kind of \"selling heads\" business will become more and more common.

In addition, some kind of alliance of interests is also forming between DEX and aggregators. Prop AMMs(proprietary market makers) and DEX rely heavily on traffic generated by aggregators, which are fully capable of charging these liquidity providers and returning some of their profits to front-end applications in the form of \"rebates.\"

For example, when Phantom Wallet routes a user\'s transaction to Jupiter, an underlying liquidity provider (such as HumidiFi or Meteora) may pay Jupiter in order to gain the right to enforce the transaction. Jupiter received the \"channel fee\" and returned part of it to Phantom.

Although this conjecture has not been publicly confirmed, the author believes that driven by interests, this \"hidden rule of profit distribution\" within the industrial chain is almost a natural phenomenon.

Blood Market Order

When a user clicks \"Confirm\" in his wallet and signs, the transaction is essentially a \"Market Order\" with sliding parameters.

For the application side, there are two ways to process this order:

The virtuous path: sell the \"Backrun\" opportunity generated by the transaction to a professional trading company, and everyone can share the profits. The so-called Backrun means that when a user\'s purchase order in DEX1 pushes up the token price in DEX1, the arbitrage robot immediately buys in DEX2 in the same block (which does not affect the user\'s purchase price in DEX1), and sells in DEX1.

Vicious route: Help clips (sandwich arbitrageurs) attack their own users and push up the user\'s transaction price.

Even if you follow a benign path, it does not mean that the application side has a conscience. In order to maximize the value of \"trailing arbitrage\", the application side has the motivation to deliberately slow down the speed of trading. Driven by profits, applications may also deliberately route users to pools with less liquidity, thereby artificially creating greater price fluctuations and arbitrage space.

It is reported that some well-known front-end applications on Solana are doing the above operations.

Who took your tip?

If the above-mentioned methods still carry some technical thresholds, then the secret operation on \"transaction fees\" can be said to be \"no longer performed.\"

On Solana, the fee paid by users is actually divided into two parts:

-Priority fee: This is a fee within the agreement and is paid directly to the verifier.

-Transaction tip: This is a SOL transfer to any address, usually paid to a \"Landing Service\" like Jito. The service provider then decides how much it will be given to the verifier and how much it will be refunded to the application.

Why do I need a landing service provider? Because the Solana network is extremely complex in communication during congestion, ordinary transaction broadcasts can easily fail. Landing service providers play the role of \"VIP channels\". They promise users the successful chain of transactions through specially optimized links.

Solana\'s complex Builder Market and fragmented routing system have given birth to this special role and created an excellent rent-seeking space for applications. Applications often induce users to pay high tips to \"ensure success\", and then share the premium with the landing service provider.

Transaction flow and fee map

Let\'s look at a set of data. During the week of December 1 to 8, 2025, 450 million transactions were generated across Solana\'s network.

Among them, Jito\'s landing service processed 80 million transactions, occupying a dominant position (93.5% of the builder market share). Among these transactions, the vast majority are trade-related Swap, oracle updates and market maker operations.

In this huge traffic pool, users often pay high fees in order to \"seek speed.\" But is all this money really used to speed up?

Not exactly. Data shows that low-activity wallets (usually retail investors) pay ridiculously high priority fees. Considering that the blocks were not filled at the time, these users were obviously overcharged.

The application uses users \'fear of \"transaction failure\" to induce users to set extremely high tips, and then collects this premium through an agreement with the landing service provider.

Anti-typical Axiom

In order to more intuitively demonstrate this \"harvesting\" mode, the author conducted an in-depth case study of Axiom, a head application on Solana.

Axiom generates transaction fees that are the best in the entire network, not only because it has a large number of users, but also because it is the hardest to slaughter customers.

Data shows that the median priority fee (p50) paid by Axiom users is as high as 1,005,000 lamps. For comparison, high-frequency trading wallets only pay about 5,000 to 6,000 lamps. This is a 200-fold gap.

The same is true for Tips.

The tips paid by Axiom users on on-site services such as Nozomi and Zero Slot far exceed the market average. The application side takes advantage of users \'extreme sensitivity to \"speed\" and completes double charging users without any negative feedback.

The author bluntly speculated: \"The vast majority of transaction fees paid by Axiom users eventually return to the pockets of the Axiom team.\"

Reclaim fee pricing power

The serious mismatch between user incentives and application incentives is the root cause of the current chaos. Users don\'t know what reasonable fees are, and applications are happy to maintain this chaos.

To break this situation, we need to start from the underlying market structure. The introduction of Solana\'s multiple concurrent proposers (MCP) and Priority Ordering mechanism, as well as the widely proposed dynamic base fee mechanism, expected around 2026, may be the only way to solve the problem.

Multiple Concurrent Proposers

The current Solana single proposer model is easy to form a temporary monopoly, and the application side only needs to get the current Leader to control the transaction packaging rights in a short period of time. After the introduction of MCP, multiple proposers work concurrently in each slot, which significantly increases the cost of attacks and monopolies, improves censorship resistance, and makes it difficult for applications to contain users by controlling a single node.

Priority Ordering

Eliminates the randomness of sorting by the protocol layer. This weakens the need for users to be forced to rely on private acceleration channels such as Jito simply to \"protect their mistakes.\" For ordinary transactions, users no longer need to guess how much to tip. As long as they pay within the agreement, verifiers across the network will prioritize them based on deterministic rules.

Dynamic Base Fee

This is the most critical step. Solana is trying to introduce a concept similar to the Ethereum Dynamic Base Fee.

Users no longer blindly tip, but explicitly issued an instruction to the agreement: \"I am willing to pay the highest amount of X Lamports for this transaction to be linked.\"

The agreement automatically charges based on current congestion levels. If it is not blocked, only charge a low price; if it is blocked, only charge a high price. This mechanism takes back the pricing power of fees from applications and middlemen and returns it to transparent protocol algorithms.

Meme brought prosperity to Solana, but it also left the root cause of its illness and left behind an impetuous profit-seeking gene. If Solana wants to truly realize ICM\'s vision, it cannot allow applications that control front-end traffic and protocols that control infrastructure to collude and do whatever they want.

As the saying goes,\"Clean the house before treating you.\" Only by upgrading the underlying technical architecture, using technical means to eradicate the soil for rent-seeking, and developing a fair and transparent market structure that puts user welfare first can Solana truly have the confidence to integrate and compete with the traditional financial system.