Solana's 2025 Staking Milestone: 415M SOL Locked In as Ecosystem Tackles MEV Profitability

At a Glance:

• Over 415 million SOL staked by year-end 2025, accounting for 75% of the network’s circulating supply—a structural shift in security participation
• Front-running and sandwich attack profitability plummeted 60–70% following coordinated validator enforcement and infrastructure changes
• Major staking protocols including Marinade Finance and Jito Foundation removed 50+ malicious validators, safeguarding $2 billion+ in delegated assets
• Native staking momentum accelerated as institutional capital flowed in, overtaking liquid staking tokens in certain metrics for the first time

The MEV Problem That Nearly Went Unnoticed

For most of 2024, a quiet extraction was happening beneath Solana’s surface. Sandwich attacks—where malicious validators or bots intercepted user transactions, executed their own orders at better prices, then settled trades behind users’ original submissions—siphoned an estimated $370–$500 million over 16 months.

The scale was staggering. Data indicated roughly 0.72% of all blocks contained sandwich activity, but certain bad-actor validators took it to extremes. Some operators embedded sandwich tactics in as much as 27% of their block production, essentially privatizing MEV extraction at retail users’ expense.

On a network known for speed and efficiency, Solana’s low fees and sub-second finality paradoxically made these attacks cheap to orchestrate and difficult for users to detect. Slippage complaints and front-running grievances had reached a tipping point by early 2025.

The Ecosystem’s Coordinated Crackdown

Rather than waiting for protocol-level fixes, Solana’s key stakeholders moved in parallel.

Validator Blacklisting & Delegation Shifts Marinade Finance took the most aggressive stance, removing over 50 validators from its Stake Auction Marketplace after confirming sandwich attack participation. This single measure protected more than $2 billion in delegated SOL by cutting off bad actors’ revenue streams entirely.

The Solana Foundation followed suit, exclusionary malicious validators from its delegation distribution programs—a signal that MEV abuse would no longer be treated as acceptable “gray area” behavior.

Infrastructure-Level Intervention In March 2025, Jito Foundation shut down its public mempool, effectively eliminating the primary attack vector for transaction sniffing and front-running. By removing this low-friction entry point, the barrier to executing sandwich attacks rose substantially.

The Results Profitability from sandwich tactics collapsed 60–70%. User complaints filed against front-running and excessive slippage dropped roughly 60% across leading Solana decentralized exchanges. The attacks didn’t vanish—but they became significantly harder, riskier, and far less rewarding.

Staking Composition Shifts as Capital Floods In

The security improvements coincided with unprecedented staking participation.

By Q4 2025, approximately 415 million SOL was locked in staking, representing 75% of the network’s total circulating supply of 564.6 million SOL. Weekly transaction volumes climbed to roughly 600 million, while institutional capital inflows in Q3 2025 reached an estimated $530 million.

This wasn’t just a numbers game—it reflected a fundamental restructuring of how Solana’s security model functioned.

Native Staking Emerges as the “Pure” Choice

For years, liquid staking tokens (LSTs) dominated Solana’s staking landscape because they offered flexibility and DeFi composability. In 2025, that dynamic flipped.

Native staking protocols began closing the usability gaps that had historically favored LSTs. Marinade Finance’s native SOL staking TVL surged 21% quarter-over-quarter, climbing to 5.3 million SOL and surpassing its liquid staking token mSOL for the first time.

The appeal was clear: instant exit mechanisms, simplified UX directly from self-custody wallets, and yield generation without smart contract layers, rehypothecation risks, or regulatory ambiguity.

Native staking became the preference for institutions and risk-conscious capital seeking “clean” custody structures and protocol transparency. Liquid staking didn’t disappear—it remained the go-to for complex DeFi strategies—but native staking established itself as the default for straightforward, custody-focused yields.

A More Deliberate Staking Base

Beyond headline figures, participation patterns evolved significantly. Retail wallets increasingly engaged in staking, while mid-sized crypto-native funds began actively optimizing delegation based on validator uptime, MEV policies, and performance metrics.

Meanwhile, top-tier institutional and custodial holders maintained their outsized share of total staked SOL, though concentration dynamics began normalizing as the active base expanded.

Most tellingly, 2025 marked the end of “set-and-forget” staking. Participants became validators’ customers, actively shopping for the best risk-adjusted returns.