Marginfi co-founder Edgar Pavlovsky suddenly left the Solana DeFi project in April.
The split was less than amicable. “I don’t agree with the way things have been done internally or externally,” Pavlovsky wrote about X at the time.
Now, eight months later, Pavlovsky is a key contributor to Paladin, a Solana client aimed at protecting validators from so-called sandwich attacks and helping them “earn more from block rewards.”
Around the same time, Temporal, a crypto research shop with multiple Marginfi-linked members, began advertising ‘Nozomi’, a proprietary quic client intended in part to prevent sandwich attacks.
Temporal is legally different from mrgn and marginfi. Temporal said most of its staff have never worked at marginfi.
A Temporal researcher I spoke with was critical of the project his former colleague was working on. According to both parties, the two products are not the same, but they are both aimed at the same niche. There is one notable difference, however: Pavlovsky’s Paladin has a token, while marginfi, controversially, has yet to debut a native coin.
Temporal’s Nozomi infrastructure is built to land transactions as quickly as possible. It also prevents sandwich attacks by only sending transactions to ‘whitelisted’ Solana validators that are known not to attack users. The project presents this as a way to democratize trade.
“We have a lot of experience with our trading department to get the best execution for what we want to do,” said Jakob Povsic, a developer at Temporal. Temporal means ‘achieving this level of sophistication for almost everyone’.
Paladin, on the other hand, is a fork of the Jito-Solana client that identifies and removes sandwich attacks from transaction bundles and helps Solana validators prioritize transactions that have high priority fees, Pavlovsky told me. Access to Paladin validators will eventually be capped with the yet-to-be-launched PAL token.
I asked Pavlovsky whether building a product with similar anti-sandwiching goals as his former colleagues at Temporal will push him to compete more aggressively.
“No man, they look like my kids,” Pavlovsky said, chuckling. “I’m happy they’re winning, and I’m happy they’re building.” He said blockchain infrastructure makers often have too much of a winning mentality, when in fact several companies can succeed at the same time.
Povsic showed less bonhomie. “I applaud them for going after sandwiches ever since [it’s] a big problem, but their approach is naive and bad [self-serving] from what we see,” he said of Paladin. Povsic added that Paladin will “arbitrarily” block some transactions based on a broad network of criteria, and advanced players will still be able to make sandwiches. And ‘forcing’ his own sign into the equation made things even worse for Povsic.
Pavlovsky responded to the criticism by saying the anti-sandwich whitelist is “clearly systematic and not arbitrary.”
“[P]aladin is designed with advanced players in mind (and is extensively tested against sandwichers across the network). [W]We are always ready to discuss compromises,” Pavlovsky said in a text message.
“[We] think [Paladin] is extractive and prefers to focus on open source initiatives rather than direct a percentage of priority fees to them [Bloxroute]who own 20% of the token supply. Nozomi is very different because it is simply a product to help land transactions quickly,” said Temporal partner and co-founder of mrgn research, Ben Coverston.
The PAL token is an interesting part of the equation. Marginfi is regularly criticized for its so-called points program that tracks users’ contributions to the platform. Points are often used to allocate token airdrops, but marginfi is one of the last major Solana DeFi protocols not to release a token. Pavlovsky never mentioned the lack of a marginfi token in his departure post in April 2024.
I asked him if the frustration at the platform not launching a token contributed to his departure. “[I] am pro token and think this was the right time to send one [Q4] 2023,” Pavlovsky said in response.
