Infrastructure

What is Slipstream? AllenHark's Sender-Agnostic Solana Transaction Relay

March 5, 2026•AllenHark Team

What is Slipstream?

If you've been trading on Solana — whether it's arbitrage, sniping, liquidations, or any latency-sensitive strategy — you've probably experienced the frustration of slow transaction landing. You pick a sender, send your transaction, and hope it reaches the leader in time. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn't.

Slipstream is AllenHark's answer to this problem. It's a sender-agnostic, leader-proximity-aware transaction relay that takes the guesswork out of getting your transactions on-chain fast.

The Problem Slipstream Solves

On Solana, the validator producing blocks (the "leader") changes every ~1.6 seconds. Different leaders run in different data centers around the world. When you submit a transaction through a single sender — whether that's Jito, a public RPC, or any other endpoint — your transaction always takes the same path regardless of where the leader actually is.

This means:

  • If the leader is in a US data center and your sender is in Europe, you're adding 80–200ms of unnecessary latency
  • If your sender has a temporary routing issue, your transaction may not land at all
  • If a competing sender has a faster path to the current leader, you lose to anyone using that sender

How Slipstream Works

Slipstream maintains workers in 4 global regions — US East (Chicago), EU West, EU Central, and Asia Pacific (Singapore). Each worker continuously measures its round-trip time to the current leader validator.

When you submit a transaction through the SDK, Slipstream:

  1. Identifies the current leader from the real-time leader schedule
  2. Selects the worker with the lowest RTT to that leader
  3. Picks the optimal sender — Nozomi, Helius, 0slot, or custom — based on the leader's identity and network conditions
  4. Delivers your transaction through the fastest available path

The US East worker currently achieves ~17ms RTT to the leader validator. EU workers average ~80–84ms. Even from Asia Pacific, Slipstream routes at ~228ms — and the SDK automatically picks the best option.

What Makes It Different

Sender Agnostic

You're not locked into one sender. Slipstream has integrations with multiple senders and selects the best one per transaction. If Nozomi has the fastest path to the current leader, it uses Nozomi. If 0slot is closer, it uses 0slot. You get the benefit of all senders without managing any of them.

4-Protocol Fallback

Slipstream supports QUIC (port 4433), gRPC (10000), WebSocket (9000), and HTTP (9091). The SDK tries them in order and falls back automatically. QUIC gives the lowest latency, but if your network blocks UDP, it seamlessly switches to gRPC or WebSocket.

Atomic Bundles

Submit 2–5 transactions as an atomic bundle. Either all execute or none do — no partial fills, no inconsistent state. Bundles cost 5 tokens (0.00025 SOL).

TPU Direct Submission

For absolute minimum latency, Slipstream can submit your transaction directly to the leader's TPU via UDP. Fire-and-forget — no confirmation, no retry, just raw speed. Costs 2 tokens (0.0001 SOL) per transaction.

Real-Time Streams

Subscribe to 5 live data feeds through your existing connection:

  • Leader hints — know which worker is closest to the upcoming leader
  • Tip instructions — current tip levels for bundle priority
  • Priority fees — recommended compute unit prices with landing probabilities
  • Latest blockhash — fresh blockhashes without polling
  • Slot updates — real-time slot progression

Dynamic Region Discovery

Regions aren't hardcoded. The SDK discovers available workers from discovery.allenhark.network, ranks them by latency, and connects to the best one. As AllenHark adds more regions, your SDK picks them up automatically.

Token-Based Billing

Slipstream uses a simple pay-per-use model:

  • 1 token = 50,000 lamports = 0.00005 SOL
  • Single transaction: 1 token
  • Bundle (2–5 tx): 5 tokens
  • TPU direct: 2 tokens
  • RPC proxy call: 1 token

Deposit SOL, get tokens, pay only for what you use. There's even a free tier (100 tokens/day) to test with.

Getting Started

Slipstream has production-ready SDKs for Rust, TypeScript, and Python:

# Rust
cargo add allenhark-slipstream

# TypeScript
npm install @allenhark/slipstream

# Python
pip install AllenHarkSlipstream

Connect and submit your first transaction:

import { SlipstreamClient, configBuilder } from "@allenhark/slipstream";

const config = configBuilder()
    .apiKey("sk_live_...")
    .build();

const client = await SlipstreamClient.connect(config);
const result = await client.submitTransaction(txBytes);
console.log("Status:", result.status);

Who Should Use Slipstream

  • MEV searchers who need consistent sub-20ms delivery to the leader
  • Arbitrage bots that can't afford to lose races due to sender selection
  • Sniper bots competing for time-sensitive opportunities
  • Trading desks that want multi-sender redundancy without managing infrastructure
  • Anyone tired of being locked into a single sender

Learn More