# Oderflow Landsape

## 📊 What is Orderflow?

### Defining Orderflow

In traditional finance, orderflow is the **sequence of orders waiting to buy or sell a specific asset,** a dense packet of information that reveals the intent and aggression of market participants. Whoever gets access to this information first holds a structural advantage.

In blockchain, the stream of **pending swaps, liquidations, and arb transactions** associated with specific DEXs and applications becomes DeFi orderflow. Whoever can access and sequence this stream controls trading costs and MEV.

***

### Three Ways to Monetize Orderflow

#### ① Transaction Landing Fee

The Priority Fee users pay directly to validators. Higher fees increase the probability of block inclusion, but this mechanism resembles a **blind auction**: users have no way to know the appropriate fee level.

Because Priority Fee alone doesn't guarantee landing, services like Jito emerged to forward transactions to their network of validators first, charging a separate tip in return.

Users can't see real-time block congestion or competing transactions' fee levels, so they defensively set fees higher than necessary. This overpayment flows straight to validators and infrastructure providers.

#### ② Market Maker Access Fee (PFOF)

Certain DEXs, Prop AMMs, and Perp DEXs cut direct deals with wallets, aggregators, and RPCs to monopolize retail orderflow.

> "Transactions leaving our frontend are routed to a specific DEX/AMM" → in exchange for fee revenue and rebates

This is identical to **PFOF (Payment for Order Flow)** in traditional finance.

#### ③ Transaction Order Markets

| Approach          | Method                                                            | Result               |
| ----------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------- |
| **User-friendly** | Auction backrun rights to trading firms → return profits to users | MEV-Share (Ethereum) |
| **Exploitative**  | Facilitate sandwich attacks                                       | User harm            |

Two perverse incentives exist in this market: first, intentionally delaying transaction landing to increase backrun value; second, apps routing users to low-liquidity pools to create larger backrun opportunities. Both result in users receiving worse execution prices.

***

### The Structural Difference Between EVM and Solana

| Item                    |        Ethereum (EVM)       |               Solana               |
| ----------------------- | :-------------------------: | :--------------------------------: |
| Mempool structure       |        Public mempool       |       **None (Gulf Stream)**       |
| Transaction propagation | Broadcast to entire network |   Pushed directly to next leader   |
| MEV accessibility       |     Visible to everyone     | Only leader, relay, specific infra |
| OFA/PBS infrastructure  |   Built on public mempool   |     Private dark pool orderflow    |

Ethereum has a public mempool where MEV searchers and builders find opportunities openly. But **Solana's Gulf Stream design means it's very difficult to determine from the outside who owns or controls orderflow, or at what price it's traded.** This makes it easy for a handful of infrastructure providers to capture it exclusively.

On Solana, orderflow flows through a 'private dark pool.' This is the structural reason why the opaque MEV problem is far more severe here than on Ethereum.

***

### Flowra's Approach

Flowra solves this structural problem with an **Open Orderflow Auction**.

Multiple validators share their pending transactions to form an open stream, which then powers a publicly competitive auction. For the first time on Solana, we're creating an orderflow market that anyone can access.


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://flowra.gitbook.io/flowra/overview/oderflow-landsape.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.