Jito extended its TipRouter on-chain program to distribute Solana priority fees alongside MEV tips, giving stakers access to a revenue stream that accounts for roughly 40 percent of Solana network revenue and that validators had captured entirely since SIMD-0096 passed. The upgrade, which went live in early July 2025, builds on the TipRouter Node Consensus Network that Jito first deployed to Solana mainnet in February 2025 to move tip distribution off Jito's servers and onto a publicly verifiable on-chain program.
Priority fees account for 35 to 40 percent of Solana's total validator revenue. Since SIMD-0096 updated the network's fee rules, validators captured that stream entirely while their delegated stakers received nothing. TipRouter changes the arrangement on an opt-in basis: participating validators route their portion through an on-chain BallotBox program; stakers claim their share trustlessly once consensus is reached.
How the trust model changed
Before TipRouter, Jito Labs ran a centralized server that calculated and executed tip distributions each epoch. The original NCN replaced that server with open-source software run by 11 node operators: at the end of each epoch, operators independently compute the correct Merkle root for tip distributions and submit it to the on-chain BallotBox; once two-thirds quorum is reached, the root is set and any party can verify it against the chain. The priority fees upgrade extends the same mechanism: operators now build a combined Merkle tree covering both Jito tips and priority fees, submitting a single root to both distribution programs.
TipRouter has processed over $250 million in Jito tips since February 2025. Of the roughly $2.5 billion in annual Jito MEV fees, 97 percent flows to validators and stakers through TipRouter's distribution schedule, 2.7 percent goes to the Jito DAO treasury, and 0.3 percent is split among JitoSOL stakers and NCN node operators.
Who opts in and what it costs
Validator participation is not mandatory. Those who share priority fees pay a 1.5 percent TipRouter fee on the portion they distribute; their retained share is untouched. Validators that decline face softer pressure: Jito's Steward program, which ranks validators to determine JitoSOL delegation, incorporates priority fee commission transparency into its scoring, a competitive incentive toward participation without a protocol mandate.
Jito projected that at a conservative annual run-rate of 4 million SOL in priority fees and 50 percent sharing, the effective staker APY would rise from roughly 7 percent to 7.7 percent. JitoSOL holders benefit automatically, in proportion to their stake weight.