Zano Sherwani is the CTO and co-founder of the Jito Network, a liquid restaking platform on the Solana blockchain. ^[1][2]

Education & Career

Sherwani graduated from George Mason University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2018. He also has a professional certification in AWS DevOps Engineering. After graduation, he worked as a full-stack developer for Hungry, an office and event catering company, until May 2020. He became a software engineer for Amazon, where he worked for a full year before joining Parsec Finance in March 2021. Later, in September 2021, he co-founded Jito Labs with Lucas Bruder and serves as the company’s CTO. ^[1]

Jito

On the Logan Jastremski Podcast, Sherwani discussed Jito and building on Solana, starting with how Jito started: ^[3]

“So, I met Lucas, my co-founder Buffalo, on Twitter. It just kind of happened to be working on MEV; when I say working, I mean researching. I had just learned about MEV and the rabbit hole that it is. Lucas was working on an idea related to MEV, like an MEV DAO on Solana. He tweeted something looking for a partner to work on this thing. So, I reached out to him. The moral of the story is to be active on Twitter. You never know who's behind these PFPs; it could be a badass partner you end up starting a company with. It could go nowhere, but shoot your shot, basically.”

“So, the actual product and system looked a lot different when we were talking about it. It took a couple of weeks to converge on what the current system is, which is this validator client that's a fork of the normal client and this MEV system that sits in front of that. Zooming out a little bit, the thesis was that we believe MEV capture will be very important, and there will be a lot of value there to capture and redistribute to successful networks. The thesis is simple; the hard thing was choosing what network it would be other than Ethereum.”

He then explained why they decided to build on Solana and what their first presentation was like: ^[3]

“I'm very much aligned with the culture that Toaly and the core team originally set, which is a culture of just shipping useful things that work. I like this engineering-first approach and believe that, in the limit, this is the approach that gets mass adoption. You just have to think about distribution and users, and that's the most important thing. Multicoin had led that round, and those guys really believed in us and doubled down on us. But a funny thing about that time is, like you said, there was a big rally. It was just Luke and me at the time. All we had was an entity doc, an idea, some half-baked code, and potentially a check from Multicoin. We showed up to Breakpoint, and it was just us two. It was such a stark difference compared to the conferences we go to now. We were just two dudes; nobody knew us. We were kind of in the shadows, trying to get into all these events and not getting accepted. It was a fun time, though, being able to grind fast…Solana has come such a long way. I think you want to build something that becomes a virus, and people can't get rid of it. You see this with open-source technologies like Node.js and Java. These things are not the best pieces of tech, but at the time, they were serving a real use case, serving it well, and have spread like viruses. Solana has done a great job at that.”

When asked about adapting to Solana’s architecture, Sherwani responded: ^[3]

“The thing that makes Solana super interesting, and I feel like this isn't talked about enough, is the streaming nature of the block propagation. You can think of Solana’s block propagation and block building as continuous time. The way that works is as a validator receives transactions for a block, they immediately execute it, sign it, and stream that out to the rest of the network. They're constantly doing that in a stream-like fashion. A block is basically the start and end of a stream. In contrast, on Ethereum and most other networks, the validator or leader builds the block, signs the block header, and propagates that out to the network. This streaming versus batching makes things super interesting. This affects how the system is built; it means the state of the world is constantly changing. The blockchain is a moving target, with bundles coming in and trying to change the state on this blockchain.”

Interviews

Building MEV

On the Gaj Show with Gajesh Naik, Sherwani participated in an AMA where he answered questions about Jito Labs, MEV, and building on Solana, starting with his background: ^[4]

“So, my origin story is a typical CS track: software engineering, bounced around startups, but always interested in the decentralized money environment. Bitcoin was always super cool to me. I first heard about Bitcoin on a morning show back in 2015. Some lady had a barcode in the background of the news anchors, and they mentioned, 'Oh, that's Bitcoin,' and that sounded really cool. From then on, I went down the rabbit hole and ended up speculating on crypto. I didn't really dive in technically until around 2019-2020, when I got into DeFi and started coding EVM data indexers, running on-chain MEV bots, and mostly working on yield farming strategies. A lot happened between then and now, but here we are.”

He then discussed MEV on Solana: ^[4]

“I think MEV is just an emergent property of these systems. It's not something you should try to fight; it's something you should lean into and try to make beneficial to all users on the chain. In the next five to ten years, we're going to see MEV become more open and transparent, where it's less about exclusive order flow. We don't want to end up in that world. Being an optimist, it's more about a decentralized supply chain from transaction originator to block builder and everything in between. I'm hopeful that blockchains will tackle the problem in a way that redistributes MEV to the users responsible for generating it, which are the normal transactors on the chain. Part of my Solana thesis is the developer ecosystem. I think Solana's got one of the strongest developer ecosystems.”

When asked to explain MEV to a five-year-old, Sherwani responded: ^[4]

“I actually like this question. Let's see, what do five-year-olds want? What's their scarce resource? Let's say it's playgrounds with ball pits. All these five-year-olds absolutely have to go into one of these ball pits. The scarce resource is the space within the ball pit, which can only fit, say, 10 five-year-olds at a time. So, you start getting a line of five-year-olds trying to get into the ball pit. Every time space gets taken up in the ball pit, it costs a little extra to get in. Parents of these five-year-olds start trying to tip the ball pit organizer, the bouncer, to let them cut the line. They are willing to pay up to a certain amount to cut the line, so they can save money on actually getting into the ball pit for their child to have fun. The MEV here is cutting the line to get into the pit of balls.”

Towards the end of the interview, he provided some advice for open-source developers: ^[4]

“Actually, I would seek advice from more open source developers myself. I think there are a ton of open source developers out there doing great things. The cool thing about open source is you put your code out there, and you get a bunch of eyes on it from people all over the world, critiquing your code or giving you feedback, maybe even creating PRs if your repo is popular. The advice I would give is to build something you think is useful and put it out there. If it starts to gain traction, continue adding to it, add features, and see what people want. Just get people's eyes on it and distribute it.”

Solana 2024

In an interview with the Lightspeed Podcast, Sherwani discussed the evolution and future of Solana, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in the blockchain's development. He shared insights into his journey in crypto since 2017, the technical and economic aspects of Solana, and the importance of the network's underlying infrastructure. Sherwani elaborated on the MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) concept on Solana, the efforts to mitigate its negative impacts, and the benefits of Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS). He also emphasized the importance of effective leadership, hiring, and community trust in building successful blockchain projects. ^[5]

Panels

Evolving Solana

At Research Day 2024, Sherwani discussed the evolution of block production on Solana, highlighting the importance of decoupling block execution from other blockchain functions to enhance efficiency. He addressed current challenges, such as network congestion and unclear transaction fees, and proposed auction-based models, like just-in-time (JIT) and ahead-of-time (AOT) auctions, to optimize block production and transaction pricing. Sherwani also explored the benefits and risks of specialized entities managing block building, emphasizing the need to balance technical improvements with user-centric priorities like fast, uncensored transactions. ^[6]

Jito StakeNet

At Breakpoint 2023, Sherwani and Bruder presented Jito StakeNet, a new protocol developed by Jito Labs for decentralized liquid staking tokens (LSTs) on Solana. They explained how Jito StakeNet addresses the inefficiencies and centralization issues in liquid staking solutions using a decentralized network of keepers to manage intelligent stake pools. The protocol ensures transparency, security, and performance by making all code open source and verifiable on-chain. They highlighted the current deployment of their MEV-enabled fork of the Solana validator client, securing significant value and operating on numerous validators. Additionally, they outlined plans for security audits and the transition of JitoSOL to this new protocol, aiming to create a sustainable staking environment on Solana. ^[7]