Written by: Tia, Techub News

The Solana annual developer conference Breakpoint is typically seen as a "certification" window for new projects, and this year, the liquid staking protocol Toby has received its pass. The team announced the issuance of the governance token TOBY, with the core selling point being just one sentence: it directly incorporates the additional profits obtained by validators from MEV into the tobySOL holding returns, allowing stakers to not only receive on-chain inflation rewards but also share in the arbitrage, liquidation, and tip income generated by block ordering.

This narrative has garnered attention because Solana's MEV value chain has been largely monopolized by Jito over the past two years. The Jito-Solana client has a market share of over 94%, with Bundle auction revenues of approximately $350 million in 2024, of which over 90% comes from tips and net profits paid by searchers. Since auction revenues are only settled between validators and searchers, ordinary stakers still receive a fixed inflation rate of about 7%, which is unrelated to the scale of MEV. Alternative solutions have mostly remained at the client optimization level: Paladin has added fair sorting patches based on Jito's code, attempting to eliminate sandwich attacks; Jump Crypto's Firedancer has been rewritten in C++ with the goal of tripling TPS while maintaining compatibility with the Jito protocol. Despite significant performance improvements, neither has changed the revenue-sharing structure between "validators and searchers." In terms of private mempool, single-instance validators like DeezNode make sandwich profits through dark pool order flows, extracting tens of millions of dollars monthly, further undermining the transparency of public auctions.

OpenMEV Moves Arbitrage Profits into tobySOL in Three Steps

What Toby aims to do is not to write another client but to productize the entire "order flow—auction—settlement" process, directing upstream profits into downstream LST. The core of the protocol is named OpenMEV, a middleware embedded in validator nodes that provides a Bundle market parallel to Jito. Its operational process can be simplified into three steps: collect, auction, and distribute.

First, OpenMEV signs exclusive routing agreements with channels such as desktop wallet plugins, TG trading bots, NFT market-making APIs, and Jupiter privacy RPCs. The transaction flow first enters the middleware, and then six cooperating validators (with a total of 22 million SOL staked) locally merge searcher Bundles to form a "super block" before uniformly uploading it to the chain. To avoid duplicate auctions with Jito, the system marks the imported transaction hashes and caches them locally for 200 ms, ensuring that the same order does not appear in both markets simultaneously.

The second step is endogenous auctions. Validators score the received transactions based on extractable value, and searchers submit supplementary Bundles through the Toby-API, jointly forming the final block. The auction proceeds include searcher tips, net arbitrage profits, and part of the liquidation bonuses, converted to USDC on an hourly basis, with 95% directly injected into the tobySOL net value and 5% entering the protocol treasury. Since the settlement frequency is higher than Jito's once a day, users can see the yield on the front end accurate to the second, making it easier to compare with other DeFi yield strategies.

The third step involves incentives and penalties. If validators want to receive more order flow, they must lock TOBY tokens in the contract, with the amount locked positively correlated to their weight; if detected engaging in sandwiching or other malicious ordering, the system will reduce their distribution coefficient by 20% and publicly disclose the Bundle content on IPFS for 24 hours for community auditing. Validators who are downgraded twice in a row will lose their OpenMEV whitelist, and order flow will automatically route to the remaining nodes.

11.5% Annualized, 1 Billion Tokens, Quarterly Buybacks

Data from the three-month testnet shows that with a base of 22 million SOL, the MEV portion has an annualized return of 4.3%, combined with a benchmark staking yield of 7.2%, resulting in an approximate nominal interest rate of 11.5% for tobySOL. After the mainnet launch, the protocol aims to expand the staking scale to 10 million SOL within 12 months, corresponding to quarterly buyback funds of about $1 million to support the secondary market.

In terms of token economics, the total supply of TOBY is 1 billion, with 15% allocated for a genesis airdrop to Solana staking addresses and JTO holders, 25% as rewards for validators, 30% for the community treasury, 20% for the team, and 10% for early investors. Governance scope includes adjusting MEV distribution ratios, adding validator whitelists, and activating treasury expenditures. The amount of TOBY locked by validators determines their order flow priority, effectively writing "order flow mining" into the contract. 20% of treasury income will be used for quarterly buybacks and token burns, creating a one-way liquidity contraction.

Compared to JitoSOL, the sources of yield for tobySOL are more diverse. Jito's income relies almost 100% on its own Bundle market, while Toby has created an open market for order flow channels that can connect to any RPC, bot, or market maker, theoretically capturing a richer array of high-frequency arbitrage, NFT sniping, and high-slippage swaps. In contrast to Marinade's staking auction market (SAM), Toby operates in reverse—validators must first stake TOBY and comply with "no sandwich" clauses, or their weight will be reduced, thus locking in the cost of wrongdoing at the token level.

How Long Can tobySOL's "High-Yield Red Packet" Last?

The risks are also evident. The high substitutability of order flow channels means that if wallets or DApps switch to RPCs with higher rebates, the volume of OpenMEV Bundles will decrease; validators can simultaneously run the Jito client and privately profit from sandwiching, leading to a failure of honest incentives; from a regulatory perspective, the U.S. Treasury has sought public opinion on "the source of staking derivative income," and if MEV distributions are deemed securities returns, the compliant circulation of tobySOL may be hindered. Furthermore, the scale effect of tobySOL is closely tied to the price of TOBY: as the scale expands → MEV distributions increase → demand for tobySOL rises → more validators lock TOBY → buyback funds increase → token price rises → treasury value increases. If the scale stagnates or MEV income declines, the flywheel will immediately reverse, and token sell pressure will directly impact the protocol treasury.

Overall, Toby has incorporated MEV earnings into LST distributions, providing a new revenue dimension for the Solana staking track, but its long-term competitiveness depends on its ability to control order flow and its regulatory outlook. In the first two quarters after the mainnet launch, the scale of staking, the rate of validator lock-up, and the execution of buybacks will be key indicators to measure whether the flywheel is effective. For users, tobySOL offers a tool to automate the "block ordering rights income"; for validators, locking TOBY becomes a rigid threshold for obtaining order flow; for regulators, whether MEV earnings qualify as securities returns remains to be clarified. Whether Toby can open a second MEV value chain after Jito will depend on whether its order flow moat is deep enough and whether its token model is stable enough. At least at this stage, it has made the market aware that MEV is no longer just a desktop business between validators and searchers; it may also become the interest figure that pulses every second in the ordinary staker's current account.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。