Jito Upgrades BAM, Cutting Solana Bundle Delays by About 50ms
Jito’s Block Assembly Marketplace has reduced bundle submission delays as Solana moves toward faster slots, while early results show higher rewards for successful bundles.
Jito has upgraded its Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM) on Solana, cutting bundle submission delays by approximately 50 milliseconds. Early results also show a 72% increase in average rewards for each successful bundle, as the network tightens its timing ahead of the Alpenglow consensus upgrade.
BAM Adjusts to Faster Solana Slots
Solana reduced its target slot time to 200 milliseconds at Epoch 1053 on October 9, compressing the window available for transaction processing and block assembly. BAM responded by shortening its auction intervals from 25 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds.
The upgrade follows several weeks of performance fixes targeting kernel delays that previously ranged from 90 to 330 milliseconds. Those delays were especially significant once the network’s entire target slot became shorter than the upper end of the observed lag.
Early performance indicators include:
- Approximately 50 milliseconds less delay in bundle submission.
- A 72% rise in average rewards per successful bundle.
- A 15.5% increase in BAM tips per block following performance improvements.
A Growing Role in Block Building
BAM launched on mainnet on September 25, 2025, as a modular and verifiable block-building framework. It uses Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs, which are isolated hardware environments designed to execute code privately while allowing its results to be verified.
By the end of Epoch 1050, BAM had attracted 385 validators and 164 million SOL in delegated stake, representing approximately 37% of Solana’s total stake. FireBAM added roughly 7.3 million SOL from 12 validators.
That scale gives BAM a substantial role in how transactions are ordered across the network. Its TEE-based architecture is intended to make that ordering process private and verifiable, while the reported gains in bundle rewards and tips could improve revenue for validators connected to the system.
Alpenglow Transition Ahead
BAM nodes are expected to enter maintenance mode before Solana’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade, which is anticipated in mid-to-late October 2026. Bundle processing will continue during the transition, but validators will temporarily revert to the traditional Jito-Agave Block Engine.
BAM-specific features, including Multi-Packet Processing and Dynamic Block Incentives, will be paused while the transition proceeds. Key indicators after the upgrade will include how quickly BAM nodes return, whether the 72% reward improvement persists under the new consensus rules, and whether validator and delegated-stake totals continue to grow beyond Epoch 1050 levels.
What This Means
The BAM upgrade highlights the operational pressure created by Solana’s faster slot times. Lower latency and higher reported bundle rewards could strengthen incentives for validators to use BAM-connected infrastructure, but the framework’s growing share of delegated stake also makes its post-Alpenglow performance important for the network’s block-building landscape. The durability of the early gains—and the speed of BAM’s return from maintenance—will determine whether this is a temporary improvement or a lasting shift in Solana transaction processing.