Astralane

Astralane is a Solana infrastructure company that routes trades through the fastest available path to validators and block builders. Its stack comprises three products — a transaction gateway, a real-time shred stream, and a pre-shred block signal — assembled into a single routing layer designed for high-frequency trading desks, market makers, MEV searchers, and trading terminals that need sub-slot execution at global scale.

The problem

Solana's architecture eliminates the mempool, but it introduces a different challenge: transactions submitted through public RPC endpoints compete for inclusion without priority access to validator TPU ports or awareness of the current leader schedule. Public endpoints also expose order flow to the full network before inclusion, creating opportunities for frontrunning. Astralane addresses both problems — landing rate and privacy — through direct validator connections, multi-path routing, and atomic bundle execution.

Iris: transaction gateway

Iris is Astralane's primary product: a Solana transaction gateway that routes every submission through the fastest available path to the current block leader. Rather than sending through a single public RPC, Iris maintains warm staked connections to the next four upcoming leaders and selects between several execution paths simultaneously:

• SWQoS (stake-weighted quality of service) channels via Jito and Paladin, giving transactions priority treatment proportional to validator stake
• Private bundle lanes via block builders including Harmonic, BAM, and Rakurai
• Direct TPU submission over QUIC with revert protection

The API exposes five core methods. sendTransaction covers standard single-transaction routing. sendBundle executes up to four sequential transactions atomically — if any fails, none land, meaning failed strategies cost nothing. sendIdeal serves competitive durable-nonce scenarios by submitting two variants simultaneously and cancelling the slower one before it charges a tip. sendBatch handles up to 25 transactions per request.

Across 50,000 measured sends over 24 hours, Astralane reports landing 72% of transactions in the exact slot they were submitted for, and 96% within one slot. P50 latency is 0.77 slots. Public RPC endpoints deliver 59% within one slot under the same methodology; other MEV infrastructure providers benchmark at 64%.

Dynamic tip engine

Rather than requiring traders to set a fixed tip ceiling and accept overpayment, Astralane prices every send at the market-clearing rate based on live signals: builder contention, private TPU queue depth, and block-packing pressure. The attached tip is a ceiling, not the charge. The remainder is rebated on-chain, per transaction, to the same wallet. Traders can toggle between three modes — rebate-optimised, landing-rate-optimised, or balanced — without changing transaction construction.

Protection features

Four protections apply to every send by default:

• Revert protection: Bundles are atomic. A failed play costs no SOL, so traders can bid the full opportunity value rather than discounting for risk.
• Private path: Sends travel through staked connections and private channels directly to the leader, never touching a public mempool.
• Unbundle guard: Bundles cannot be split apart or landed twice. When two routing paths would both succeed, one is cancelled before its tip is spent.
• Sandwich check: Every landed transaction is scored against known sandwich attack patterns after the fact, with results visible per transaction in the user portal.

ShredStream: real-time intra-slot data

ShredStream delivers raw UDP shred packets from block leaders roughly 200 milliseconds ahead of standard Geyser-based data feeds. Rather than waiting for a complete block, Astralane streams individual shreds — the small packets validators broadcast as blocks are produced — directly to clients via UDP unicast, bypassing Turbine's multi-hop propagation tree.

The timing advantage operates in the propagation phase that follows transaction inclusion: because different validators reconstruct blocks at different wall-clock times depending on their network position, receiving shreds earlier translates directly to faster state observation. Traders can reconstruct account state, spot orderbook changes, and trigger follow-on logic milliseconds before standard gRPC endpoints reflect the same state.

ShredStream uses a pay-as-you-use tiering model based on 24-hour accumulated tips. Tier 1 (0.2 SOL tips in 24 hours) covers development and testing access; Tier 2 (0.5 SOL) unlocks production ultra-low-latency with more validator-direct shred sources and broader leader coverage. Tips are registered through dedicated ShredPay endpoints and only count toward tier eligibility when posted there.

Postpack Confirmations: pre-shred block signal

Postpack Confirmations is Astralane's earliest-available block outcome product, currently invite-only. It streams block resolution data from the instant the scheduler commits — before shreds exist and earlier than any confirmed-commitment RPC feed. This allows trading systems to act on block outcomes before the rest of the network begins reconstructing the block. Access is available via application.

Global network

Astralane operates gateway nodes across eight regions: Frankfurt, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Singapore, Limburg, and Lithuania. Data centres include Cherry, Edgevana, Teraswitch, Latitude, and OVH facilities. Between edges, the network runs RTT-optimised links over private fiber, multicast points of presence, and DC-to-DC private cables, with public internet fallback on every route. By Astralane's own measure, 98.5% of active Solana stake sits within 50 milliseconds of an Astralane gateway.

Open source and ecosystem integration

The core Iris transaction sender is published as an open-source Rust library — iris-rs on GitHub — allowing teams to run the lightweight TPU client independently or integrate it into existing infrastructure. Astralane is also listed on the QuickNode Marketplace as an add-on for teams already using QuickNode's RPC endpoints.

In Spring 2026, RPC Fast formally integrated Astralane into the execution layer of its Beam transaction sender, using Astralane's direct-to-leader delivery to maintain landing rates during network congestion. This partnership placed Astralane alongside OrbitFlare, Corvus Labs, and bloXroute as part of Beam's expanded routing infrastructure.

Ecosystem role

Astralane occupies the execution infrastructure layer of the Solana trading stack, alongside alternatives such as Jito and bloXroute. Multi-relay submission across Jito and Astralane in parallel has become common practice among production high-frequency operators on Solana. The platform targets three traffic classes: HFT desks sending latency-sensitive orders, trading terminals aggregating retail swap flow and passing tip rebates back to users, and MEV searchers running bundles for backruns, snipes, liquidations, and copy-trading strategies. Astralane was founded in 2024.