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Priority fee

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia
Priority fee
Priority fee
Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki
typeTrading and network term
chainSolana
relatedJito tips, compute units, MEV

A priority fee is the extra payment attached to a Solana transaction to win validator inclusion, which trench traders raise aggressively, alongside Jito tips, to land trades during launches.

Contents
  1. 1 Definition
  2. 2 Why the trenches pay
  3. 3 Jito tips
  4. 4 References

Definition

A priority fee is the optional payment added to a Solana transaction, on top of the fixed base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature (0.000005 SOL), to persuade the current block producer to include and order the transaction sooner. It is priced per compute unit: the sender sets a compute unit price in micro lamports, and the total fee equals that price multiplied by the transaction's compute unit limit. A transaction defaults to a budget of 200,000 compute units and can request up to 1.4 million; a typical meme coin swap consumes roughly 100,000 to 300,000, according to fee guides. Under normal conditions compute unit prices of a few thousand micro lamports suffice, while congestion can push the going rate up by orders of magnitude.

Why the trenches pay

In the trenches, transaction inclusion is the trade. When a hyped token launches on a bonding curve, thousands of buys target the same state in the same slots, and only the transactions that validators order first get the early price. A sniper who lands three slots late buys everyone else's exit. Trading bots and terminals therefore expose priority settings, commonly labeled fast or turbo, and serious snipers set them manually and high. Overpaying by a few dollars is rational when the alternative is missing a 100x entry or being unable to sell into a collapse, which is why fee spikes are themselves a sentiment indicator: expensive blocks mean the casino is full.

Jito tips

Alongside protocol priority fees runs a second, larger market: tips paid through jito, the dominant Solana MEV infrastructure. A Jito tip is a direct payment to the validator for including a bundle, a group of transactions executed atomically and shielded from front running. Analyses in early 2025 reported Jito tips accounting for over 60 percent of all non base fee revenue on Solana, several times native priority fees, and one study of the official trump launch reported snipers paying median tips above 1 SOL per transaction. In practice a trench trade during a hot launch pays both: a priority fee to price inclusion and a Jito tip to buy certainty. Both are burned money if the transaction fails, which is part of the house edge the trenches accept.

References

Category: Lexicon