Solana’s Decentralization Crossroads: Vote Batching Cuts Costs, but MEV Rewards Still Favor Giants

Solana vote batching dropped validator breakeven from 7,200 SOL to 929 SOL – an 87% reduction. Small validators went from -1.33 SOL/epoch to +0.61 SOL/epoch. But Jito MEV distribution remains heavily skewed: a 500k SOL validator earns 538x more MEV than a 929 SOL one. Now SIMD-0411 could make 5.6% of current validators unprofitable within 3 years. A governance vote will decide if Solana’s validator set expands to 2,000+ or contracts back to a few hundred. Full story 👇