On Friday, the developer of the popular Solana client Jito suddenly shut down its mempool functionality, CoinDesk reported. Although this feature has exposed traders to a series of expensive pincer attacks, it remains a critical part of Jito’s technology stack. Jito Labs said in a tweet on Friday that the mempool feature will be offline that evening. Mempool is where on-chain transactions live before being added to the blockchain. Solana doesn't have a mempool, but Jito's transaction ordering method does. Two weeks ago, Jito's message in his Discord server revealed that Jito had lifted the ban on "manipulation" because it deemed the restrictions unenforceable. Manipulation is a colloquial term to describe a "pincer attack" where a trading bot exploits trades that have been added to the mempool but not yet executed. The bot "pinches" the trade to extract value from the trader before the trader has a chance to execute. Jito builds and manages an alternative client for the Solana blockchain to process transactions. At last check, more than half of the validators used it. Representatives for Jito did not respond to requests for comment.

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