Everstake's Blockspace Sold Solana (SOL) Trade Data for $4,000 a Month, Probe Alleges

Blockspace Sold Trade Access for $4,000 a Month

Solana (SOL) ships without a public mempool by design — a choice meant to keep front-running out of the network. A new on-chain investigation by Corvus Labs researcher Andrei Vacariu alleges that design has instead been repackaged into a paid product. Blockspace, a service sold by validator operator Everstake, markets a $4,000-per-month private feed of pending trades, with the operator’s own documentation describing exactly that tier. Validators who join are courted with payouts starting at 10 SOL — roughly $1,000 — per month for sharing the early view of the traffic they receive while scheduled to build a block. Armed with that data, quant desks can allegedly front-run and sandwich-attack ordinary orders on DeFi exchanges before those trades ever execute. Vacariu traced the money on-chain: a Blockspace revenue-sharing vault has disbursed payments to Prostaking, RockawayX, Staking Facilities and Stake.org, with Staking Facilities allegedly collecting more than 950 SOL since July and Prostaking over 200. Everstake, led by former Grayscale founding general manager David Kinitsky, is not a single machine but an association of 39 validators holding more than 50 million SOL in collective staking weight, of which about 7.4 million SOL is delegated directly. Customers can reportedly run Everstake software that mirrors incoming traffic to Everstake servers before any block exists, letting their orders slip in just before — or right after — retail flow. Per the same trace, salespeople have also been soliciting additional validator node operators to join the scheme. His summary for ordinary users was blunt: “Every trader on Solana hits these slots, can’t tell which leaders mirror their traffic, and can’t opt out.” Everstake pushed back in an X statement, claiming it runs “filtering mechanisms specifically to prevent this type of activity,” and noting that other major ecosystem players run MEV infrastructure through different architectures. The allegations land in a market where order-flow exploitation is already measurable: private Prop AMMs were recently found to capture up to 30% of Solana DEX volume.

Transaction V1 Triples the Size Ceiling

While that dispute played out, the protocol itself kept moving. On September 15, at roughly 01:00 UTC, Solana activated Transaction V1 at the start of mainnet epoch 1,035, lifting the maximum serialized transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes — a more than threefold expansion of the per-transaction envelope. The larger format lets developers pack more instructions, signatures and data into a single atomic transaction, where every step succeeds or fails together, instead of splitting complex operations across several submissions. Workloads that strained under the old 1,232-byte ceiling — zero-knowledge proofs, large multisignature wallets and other data-heavy operations — are the clearest beneficiaries. Crucially, the upgrade changes nothing about performance: throughput, fees and confirmation speed are untouched, so this is a capacity change rather than a scalability one. The v1 format also replaces the older Address Lookup Tables with inline account handling while keeping the existing 64-account limit per transaction. Legacy and v0 transaction formats keep working; applications must opt in to v1, and wallets, indexers and RPC providers need software updates before they can build, sign or read the new format correctly. The market’s reaction was muted. SOL traded modestly lower through a soft session for crypto at large and was changing hands near $97, having slipped beneath the psychological $100 line around the activation. The near-term chart now leans on the $95–$98 band as key support, with a sustained break below $95 opening the low-$90s; a reclaim of $100 and a push through $103–$105 would put the $110 resistance area back in focus. Whether the extra room translates into real developer activity is the medium-term question: if builders start routing zero-knowledge proofs and batched multisig flows through v1, the effect should surface in application development and transaction counts over time.

Trust, Not Throughput, Is the Test

The two stories land in the same week and frame the same Solana network from opposite ends. The upgrade’s published specifications confirm the concrete change — a feature-gated activation at mainnet epoch 1,035 on September 15 near 01:00 UTC, lifting serialized size from 1,232 to 4,096 bytes with fees and throughput untouched. For node operators the impact is opt-in support work rather than a consensus break: legacy formats remain valid, and nothing resembling a contentious hard fork is required. Capacity is thus advancing on schedule and is verifiable on-chain within days. The Blockspace allegations are a different kind of problem — whether scheduled block leaders sell privileged order flow — and no byte count settles it. COINOTAG’s read: if the feed claims stand, the trust cost to retail will outlast any capacity upgrade.