Lucas Bruder is the CEO and co-founder of the Jito Network, a liquid restaking platform on the Solana blockchain. ^[1][2]

Education

Bruder graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Bachelor’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2016. He was also a model and firmware intern at Tesla Motors. ^[1][3]

Career

After graduation, Bruder worked as a firmware engineer for Mindtribe Product Engineering, a connected hardware development company, until March 2018. He then became a robotics engineer and technical lead for Built Robotics, an autonomous construction equipment development company, where he worked until September 2020. In December 2020, he worked as a firmware engineer for Ouster, a lidar hardware and solutions company for various industries, where he worked until October 2021. He worked part-time on maximal extractable value (MEV) for an undisclosed company during this time. In October 2021, he became CEO of Jito. ^[1][3]

Jito

On the Bell Curve podcast, Bruder discussed the Jito Network, its history, and its goal of bringing staking to Solana. He started with why he created Jito: ^[4]

“A quick history on Jito and how we got here: we started working on MEV initially and realized quickly that we could create a flywheel with JitoSOL in the MEV stack. Then, we got into liquid staking, and by mid-2023, we started ideating on StakeNet, our way of decentralizing stake pools on Solana and liquid staking tokens. For those who don't know, Solana uses delegated proof of stake. When you run a stake pool, you have a bunch of stakes and need to decide where it goes, and which validators to use. There are a bunch of different ways to do that, but the main point is that someone or something has to do it. For many stake pools in Solana, a hot wallet basically does it. We realized that if we wanted liquid staking to grow and be massive on Solana, that hot wallet would be a point of concern for potential security issues related to hacks and such. So, we started developing StakeNet. By late 2023, we saw what was going on with EigenLayer, and also, as we started ideating more StakeNet, a few pieces needed to be decentralized, like oracles. We saw the uptick in EigenLayer and how many liquid staking tokens were getting involved, acting like a vacuum for liquid staking tokens. This inspired us to decentralize things further on StakeNet.”

He then discussed the design choices for Jito’s restaking: ^[4]

“We think that restaking will look different on Solana compared to Ethereum. There may be aspects where you're using staked assets like LSTs or StakSPL to secure things, but we believe a large component will involve governance tokens or utility tokens. Solana has a lot of activity and it's very cheap to send transactions, so there's a lot of bots and automation involved with many protocols. We called it restaking, but the goal is to make it flexible for protocols: they can use LSTs or their own governance tokens. The first system we thought about was isolated, meaning every AVS was isolated from each other, to manage how much security is actually needed and to mitigate the risks of slashing events.”

“The more I talked to people, the more it seemed that if this isn't pooled, someone might build a pooled wrapper on it, or there might be certain use cases where it fragments the liquidity and security. If there is a scenario where there's a bunch of L2s with significant TVL on Solana, then an isolated model would look strange, or you'd need AVSs merging together to meet their security requirements…Then we realized that maybe pooled isn't that bad if the right restrictions and controls are in place, and the risk is easy to audit. We also saw the adoption of LRTs, and JitoSOL is a liquid staking token that represents Solana stake accounts that are not liquid. I was initially worried that if we released that, it might not get the full adoption it deserves and might not meet the high bar we want for the protocol and products. So, we went back to the drawing board and built the LRTs into the protocol, making the only way to stake through an LRT. We also added bidirectional agreements between all parties involved to control and audit the risk, with caps on slashing and other safeguards. This way, people have the liquidity of the LRTs, and the actual assets used for the LRTs can be decided by the LRT creator. AVSs can support certain assets or be selective on the LRTs they accept.”

When asked about restaking on Solana versus Ethereum, Bruder responded: ^[4]

“Solana is very fast and very cheap with low latency. While storage on Solana is relatively cheap, it's not suitable for large files like movies, but you can store kilobytes or megabytes of data. There are many system calls built into Solana, including some related to ZK (Zero-Knowledge) technology, even though I'm not an expert in that area. Unlike Ethereum, where restaking primarily involves off-chain activities, I believe Solana will see more on-chain activity and networks running on top of it. For example, oracles could operate on Solana where people stake to oracles, and their prices could be a stake-weighted average of the prices they upload. If they fail to upload data within a certain time frame, they could be slashed. This is an example of an AVS running on-chain. Additionally, some of the StakeNet stuff we're working on, like StakeNet, is fully on Solana.”

He then answered the question, “Do you see restaking being a driver on the Solana roadmap?”: ^[4]

“I think the most obvious use case in the world I'm in is MEV. You have to be very careful about the design, but it lets you move faster and try things the protocol can't do. Solana is a very fast-moving protocol, so this might be less valid, but you can experiment with modifications to see if they work without baking them into the protocol. However, you have to consider any second-order effects and the irreversible nature of some changes. There’s a lot of path dependency in PBS, and once certain doors are opened, they can't be closed. There's opportunity for innovation, but builders need to consider the potential impacts to avoid negative outcomes.”

Interviews

Halborn AMA

In November 2022, Halborn’s Arabdha Sudhir interviewed Bruder about Jito Labs and his journey into crypto and blockchain: ^[5]

“Yeah, so I studied computer engineering in college. Always had this passion for computers and working on hard problems. I worked at Tesla for a bit on the Model X, specifically on the Falcon Wing doors, on the team that programs anything that moves or lights up on the car. Then I got into robotics, working on self-driving bulldozers and excavators. During that time, I was really interested in crypto, more from an investing standpoint. The first time I dove into programming as a blockchain developer was when I read Dan Robinson's Dark Forest article, where he explained that Ethereum has a bunch of bots lurking in the mempool looking to make money. The day after I read that, and every day for the next two months, I stayed up until three in the morning after my day job working on that MEV bot and just fell in love with it. "

"This led me to the Solana Hackathon, where I participated and fell in love with the user experience on Solana. I knew I wanted to go down this route but wasn't sure what it would look like. I had this theory that, seeing the success Flashbots had on Ethereum in reducing gas and making the chain run more efficiently, there was potential to explore similar opportunities. And then at the same time, I saw the inefficiencies that some of the low-fee, high-throughput chains were having with spam and MEVA. So I had this idea that the same thing would happen to Solana. So I decided to dive into solving this on Solana. And that's kind of the origin story of Jito.”

He then explained why MEV was important to blockchains: ^[5]

“One is it can be a centralizing force on blockchains. On chains where latency is super important, teams with the best infrastructure, lowest latency, and private deals can start to earn higher rewards than others and compound that stake back into their validator. Another reason is that if MEV is not mitigated or captured properly, it can result in a poor user experience. During times of high volatility on Solana, you can see this with arbitrage bots and liquidators spamming the chain to capture money. We released an MEV dashboard a few months ago, and if you look at arbitrage, the rate of failures in arbitrage is like 99%. Same with liquidations.”

“So all those wasted transactions are taking up space in blocks where a user's transactions could be. That's why we wanted to work on this problem: to ensure users have a good experience interacting with blockchains and to prevent centralization. Redistribution is also crucial to us, ensuring that stakers receive their fair share of MEV captured on these blockchains. We're addressing these issues by building high-performance MEV infrastructure for Solana. We have a few products, including Jito-Solana, our Solana Labs validator fork, which incorporates MEV parameters. This includes transaction bundles, which are lists of transactions that execute sequentially and atomically, and the MEV tip side.”

When asked about Jito’s security strategy, Bruder responded: ^[5]

“We're definitely taking auditing seriously and thinking about it from an attacker's perspective. We stress internally about how someone might break or abuse the system. This is crucial in application development, especially for on-chain programs, which, while somewhat isolated from the real world, still require consideration of potential vulnerabilities. Developing Layer 1 solutions is challenging, and although we're not developing an L1 ourselves, we recognize the difficulty of considering all possible attack vectors. We need to adopt an attacker's mindset and address common issues like race conditions and panics.”

Future of Solana

On the Midcurve Podcast, Bruder shared insights into his career and the future of Solana. He discussed his embedded systems and robotics background, including his work with Tesla and his work in automating construction equipment. Bruder also explained Jito's role in Solana's ecosystem, particularly focusing on liquid staking and its impact on network efficiency. He touched on challenges in the crypto space, such as handling network bugs and maintaining reliability. He highlighted the importance of fast iteration and efficient algorithms for building successful applications on Solana. ^[6]

Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs)

In a fireside chat at Consensus 2024, Bruder and Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, discussed the evolution of Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs) on Solana, highlighting their growth from 1-2% to over 6% of total staking. The conversation covered the differences between single validator LSTs and decentralized solutions like JitoSOL, which distributes staking across 200 validators to enhance decentralization and yield. The panel also introduced StakeNet, a protocol to automate and decentralize LST management. They explored future DeFi innovations on Solana, noting the challenges and unexpected complexities encountered, such as sophisticated network exploits and the need for robust, decentralized systems to ensure stability and security. ^[7]

Jito Labs

On the Logan Jastremski Podcast, Bruder discussed his background in engineering and his transition from working on hardware at Tesla to focusing on blockchain technology and crypto. He detailed his experiences with Ethereum and Solana, highlighting the unique aspects of Solana's architecture, such as its lack of a global mempool and its transaction processing innovations. Bruder explained how Jito Labs addressed challenges in MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) through improved transaction bundling and infrastructure. He also discussed how their technology optimized blockchain performance and user experience, particularly transaction efficiency and reducing spam. ^[8]

MEV on Solana

On the Bell Curve Podcast, Eugene Chen and Bruder discussed how Solana's approach to Miner Extractable Value (MEV) differed from Ethereum's, primarily due to Solana's lack of a mempool and its rapid block times. They explored the impact of Solana's low latency on transaction ordering and MEV exploitation, noting that Solana's transaction processing involved sending transactions to multiple block leaders. Bruder highlighted Jito Labs' efforts to address MEV by introducing a transaction bundling system with atomic execution guarantees. The conversation also covered the challenges of managing transaction fees and prioritization, focusing on how these issues might evolve with future enhancements like Proposer/Bidder Separation (PBS). ^[9]