How CatScope Handles Transaction Fairness

The Solana ecosystem increasingly seeks to reduce sandwich attacks and related MEV behaviors. There are two primary ways to approach this problem: through technical restrictions and economic incentives. CatScope focuses on the latter — making the default “vanilla” Agave client competitive with alternative MEV providers, and by aligning economic incentives.

Technical Design and Limitations

CatScope does not implement any custom block construction, transaction ordering, or bundling logic. Instead:

  • CatSCope simply wraps the Agave validator client, with no modifications to how transactions are sequenced.
  • Transactions submitted to CatScope are sent directly via Agave’s sendTransaction mechanism.
  • We do not stall, batch, or reorder transactions.
  • There is no support for transaction bundles or block assembly — these concepts are not part of our design.

Validators using CatScope expose a gRPC endpoint and run a Geyser plugin to collect fees through bandwidth auctions. That’s it. CatScope acts purely as a coordination layer — we are not in the critical path of transaction submission or inclusion.

Economic Alignment

CatScope is designed to create long-term, recurring revenue for validators — not short-term extraction.

Each validator runs multiple auctions per day. Their income depends on searchers voluntarily returning and paying high fees for guaranteed bandwidth. If a validator engages in sandwiching or manipulates transactions, searchers will leave immediately, taking their fees with them.

This ongoing relationship creates a strong business incentive for validators to maintain fairness, reliability, and transparency. Reputation matters. Validators who consistently deliver unmanipulated results will earn more over time — and CatScope is built to support that alignment.

Our business model does not benefit from manipulation or unfair execution:

  • We do not act as a validator or counterparty.
  • We do not route or front-run transactions.
  • Our role is to help validators earn recurring revenue by selling reliable, manipulation-free bandwidth.
  • Searchers connect directly to validators, and can quickly switch if trust is broken.

Buyers pay fees to validators based on trust and results. Repeated manipulation reduces trust, damages validator APY, and pushes bidders elsewhere. This incentive structure naturally discourages sandwiching.

Frontrunning and Sandwiching

With CatScope:

  • Searchers do not see any pending transactions that haven’t already been submitted to the leader.
  • All data is accessed via Geyser — which reflects already-submitted transactions.
  • We do not provide any private mempool access or privileged information to any party.

If a validator wants to enforce stricter anti-MEV behavior, they can modify the plugin logic.

CatScope itself does not filter or censor any transactions.

Execution Environment

CatScope does not allow searchers to run arbitrary code on the validator:

  • All logic runs in sandboxed WASM environments.
  • There is no privileged access granted to bidders or bots.
  • Validators would have to explicitly alter the plugin to permit unsafe behaviors — this is not part of CatScope’s architecture.