Introducing: BAM’s Direct Bundle Ingest

Today we’re announcing two major upgrades to BAM’s bundle infrastructure: BAM Direct Bundle Ingest (DBI), which has been live on mainnet for an early cohort of searchers over the past month, and a rebuilt path for Block Engine flow into BAM.

With DBI, searchers send bundles straight to BAM Nodes over QUIC or JSON-RPC, without routing through the Jito Block Engine. In parallel, existing Block Engine flow now reaches BAM faster and is processed more efficiently through a direct ingestion pipeline.

This marks one of the most significant upgrades to BAM’s bundle infrastructure since launch, and it lays the foundation for how Jito bundle flow on Solana will evolve from here.

BAM’s Previous Bundle Path

Bundles are a core primitive for searchers, traders and applications, thanks to features like revert protection, MEV protection and multi-transaction atomicity. 

Since launch in September 2025, BAM Nodes relied on the Block Engine for authentication, simulation and filtering, then received the bundles, ordered them within a block and sent them to BAM validators for execution. This setup added an extra hop of roughly 50ms, while failing to leverage BAM’s improved filtering and simulation capabilities.

Direct Bundle Ingest

With DBI, bundles enter BAM’s own validation, auction and validator-forwarding pipeline from the first hop. This enables searchers and applications to send bundles to BAM with lower latency, and validators to capture more value from high-value, time-sensitive bundles.

Key Features

• QUIC and JSON-RPC submission
• Pre-execution privacy
• Revert protection
• Static tips
• Native fast-path for Block Engine bundles

DBI Bundle Flow

Here’s how a bundle moves through BAM’s pipeline now:

1. A searcher submits a bundle of up to five transactions to a BAM Node over QUIC (authenticated with an Ed25519 keypair) or JSON-RPC (authenticated with a UUID)
2. The BAM Node verifies signatures on every transaction in the bundle
3. The bundle is simulated, and only bundles where every transaction succeeds move forward
4. Bundles enter BAM’s leader-aware auction and ranked by total fees (priority fees and Jito tips) over requested computed units
5. Winning bundles are sent to the current BAM leader as a single atomic batch
6. The leader executes the batch, and if any transaction fails, the entire bundle reverts

Routing Block Engine Flow Through DBI

Alongside DBI’s native submission path, we’ve also upgraded how legacy Block Engine flow reaches BAM. Authenticated bundles and sendTransaction traffic received by the Block Engine are now directly forwarded to BAM through DBI, forgoing the Block engine’s 50ms auction and enabling faster sending for existing Block Engine users.

Early Results

A core goal of the new pipeline was to increase higher quality bundle inclusion in BAM, leading to faster competition during BAM leader slots and therefore higher rewards. Comparing the two and a half week periods before and after the changes, BAM received 7.5% fewer bundles but landed 16.9% more, lifting the end-to-end land rate from 0.45% to 0.57%.

Throughout the process, applying better filtering logic on Block Engine bundles entering BAM’s transaction processing pipeline improved efficiency at every stage: simulation success rose from 11.4% to 16.1%, auction success from 3.4% to 4.7%, and the share of compute spent on failed simulations fell from 50% to 41%. That capacity is reallocated to higher-paying traffic: median fee per CU consumed increased 53%, and average reward per landed bundle rose 72%.

Despite receiving 7.5% fewer bundles, BAM doubled total landed bundle tips, from 14,279 SOL to 28,765 SOL.

Epoch 1052 is excluded because it was still in progress at the time of writing.

Why These Upgrades Matter

These results reflect the first few weeks of the new pipeline, with only an early cohort sending directly, and they are the first turn of a positive flywheel for searchers, applications, validators and, ultimately, BAM adoption:

• As more searchers and applications send bundles directly, more high-value flow reaches BAM leaders
• As that flow increases BAM validator rewards, running a BAM client becomes a stronger choice for more of the network’s stake
• As BAM’s share of stake grows, network effects for searchers and applications also grow

What To Expect

Ongoing work focuses on smarter filtering of low-quality bundle traffic and implementing other mechanisms to reduce spam, as well as increase landing speed for high quality bundles as DBI volume grows. 

Additionally, we’ll continue to make improvements to the system’s stability and scalability to serve a larger cohort of users, eventually enabling searchers and applications who mainly rely on the Block Engine to fully transition to DBI on BAM leader slots.

Request Access

If you’re a searcher or application and want to start sending BAM Bundles, please fill out this form to request access. Once whitelisted, you can start sending immediately.

If you have questions or want to get in touch, reach out at the Jito Developer Discord