Paladin

Paladin was a Solana validator client, not a wallet, game or token project. It was a fork of the Jito JTO$0.471-3.6% client, Jito-Solana. Validators who ran it blocked sandwich attacks in their own blocks. They could also take a new lane of high-fee trades and earn the PAL token. It went live in September 2024.

Paladin now appears to be inactive. Its last client release came in December 2025. By February 2026, an outside review counted just two validators still running it. It also found the website down and the X account silent. In October 2026, the paladin.one site loads a blank page and its docs domain does not resolve.

This page covers what Paladin was, how it worked, and what is left of it.

Is Paladin still active?

All the evidence we can find says no, though we have found no formal shutdown notice.

• Code: the main repository, paladin-solana, last shipped a release, v3.1.14, on 7 December 2025. The other repos in the paladin-bladesmith organisation stopped updating between September and December 2025.
• Adoption: a February 2026 review by BlockRazor found Paladin had "the smallest market share with only 2 validators". It said the website was down, "X operations have ceased", and Paladin earned the least of the block-building clients it looked at.
• Web presence: when we checked on 4 October 2026, paladin.one served an empty page and docs.paladin.one did not resolve.

The repositories are not archived, so the code is still public.

How the Paladin validator client worked

Paladin was a small patch on top of Jito's client, about 2,000 lines of code per Helius. A validator swapped Jito's build for Paladin's and kept Jito's bundle auction.

It added three things:

1. Sandwich filtering. When the validator was the leader, Paladin spotted bundles that looked like sandwiches and dropped them. A sandwich is a buy placed just before a user's trade, with a sell just after it.
2. An on-validator MEV bot. A bot inside the client took risk-free trades, such as atomic arbitrage between DEX pools and CeFi/DeFi price gaps. It ran during the validator's own slots, so no outside searcher was needed (Chorus One).
3. P3, the Paladin Priority Port. This was a direct lane for high-fee trades into the leader.

Delegators did not need to do anything. Stake stayed with the validator as normal, and Paladin never held user funds.

Paladin P3: the Paladin Priority Port

P3 let traders send high-fee trades straight to the current leader. They skipped the RPCs and relays where sandwich bots tend to watch for trades. Each P3 trade had to pay a set minimum fee, per Helius. Trades then went into the block in the order they came in.

P3 was meant to be token-gated. Validators would lock PAL to turn P3 on, which made PAL a kind of bond for honest behaviour.

Did Paladin stop sandwich attacks?

Only in part. Paladin's filter looked for a known shape of trade, and bots can change shape.

In January 2025, buffalu of Jito Labs wrote a review of the client. When Jito tried a similar check in the past, he wrote, "sandwich traders developed workarounds in less than three days". Buffalu works on Jito, a direct rival, so keep that in mind.

He also found that Paladin blocks earned 25-50% less in fees and Jito tips than Jito blocks. Jito validators fit about 23% more trades into each block.

Paladin MEV bot and validator rewards

Paladin pitched itself as a way for validators to earn more. Helius quotes a claim of 12.5% higher block rewards.

Chorus One tested the bot for a week in October 2024 on a large validator. It caught 15.84% of the atomic arbitrage on offer.

Chorus One put the whole atomic arbitrage market at about $42.4 million a year. Spread across all staked SOL, that adds at most 0.07% to yearly yield.

The study also found gaps. The bot missed many new memecoins, and each strategy update meant restarting the validator.

PAL token: supply, airdrop and slashing

PAL had a fixed supply of one billion tokens, all of it airdropped at launch. Chorus One gives this split:

Chorus One says 10% of the MEV the bot captured went to PAL. The rest went to validators and their stakers. PAL holders could vote to slash the locked PAL of a validator caught running a modified client.

We have not been able to confirm PAL's mint address from a primary source, so we don't link a token page here. Other unrelated tokens also use the PAL ticker, including Paladin DAO, so check any "PAL" listing with care.

Who Paladin was for

Paladin was built for people who run Solana validators. They had to be happy to run someone else's copy of Jito's client and update it with each Jito release. It suited operators who wanted to show they did not sandwich users. It also suited those who cared more about PAL rewards than about every last Jito tip.

It was never something ordinary users or stakers would install. Today it suits no one. A client with no new release since December 2025 is not a safe thing to run.

Paladin risks for validators and stakers

• Abandonment. The main risk has now happened. With no releases since December 2025 and no docs online, an operator running Paladin today has no support or updates.
• Lower revenue. Buffalu's January 2025 data showed Paladin blocks earning less in fees and tips than Jito-Solana blocks.
• Weak sandwich protection. Pattern checks can be dodged by searchers who split trades across bundles.
• Operational cost. Bot updates needed validator restarts, per Chorus One.
• Concentration. Twenty percent of PAL went to the team. Buffalu also flagged a large allocation to bloXroute's founder.

We found no public audit of the client or its on-chain code. That code includes programs to stake, lock up and reward PAL.

Paladin alternatives: Jito, BAM and Harmonic

BlockRazor's 2026 review set Paladin against two other ways to build blocks. Both had a far larger share of validators in that review.

• Jito-Solana and BAM (Block Assembly Marketplace): Jito's own client, plus its Block Assembly Marketplace. BAM uses secure hardware so that anyone can check how trades were ordered. Jito has shared its plan for those proofs.
• Harmonic: the third option in the same review.

Stakers who want a validator that does not sandwich can check validators by fee, MEV and uptime on our site. Note that Solana Compass runs its own validator, so we are not a neutral party.

Paladin history and timeline

Edgar Pavlovsky was a core builder of Paladin, per press reports. He co-founded marginfi and left it in April 2024. Here is how the project rose and faded.

• September 2024: Paladin launches. Chorus One runs it on its own validator as a launch partner.
• October 2024: Chorus One publishes its study of the MEV bot.
• January 2025: buffalu publishes a critical analysis of Paladin's revenue and sandwich filter.
• December 2025: last client release, v3.1.14.
• February 2026: BlockRazor finds two validators running Paladin, with the website and X account inactive.
• October 2026: the website is blank and the docs domain does not resolve.