Speed and routes

One transaction, several routes

zeroterm signs a trade once. The same bytes then go, at the same moment, to your RPC, to any extra RPCs, and to the landing services the speed turns on. A signature can be included in a block only once, so the copies cannot fill twice; they only race, and the first to reach the block's leader wins.

Each route's answer and how long it took are recorded. zeroterm then watches the signature on your RPC until it is confirmed. Every two seconds while it waits, it sends the same bytes to your RPC again (never a newly signed transaction, so the trade can never land twice), until the transaction's blockhash expires, about a minute after signing. A trade that expires never landed, and cost nothing.

Priority fee and tip

A trade can pay two things to get in faster.

• The priority fee goes to the validator that puts the trade in a block. Solana prices it per compute unit, so zeroterm lets you set it per trade and does the division. For example, 0.000022 SOL on a trade that asks for 110,000 compute units is a price of 200,000 micro-lamports per unit.
• The tip is a plain SOL transfer, inside the same transaction, to a tip account of one landing service. Landing services rank trades by it. A trade tips one service, the one in the speed's tip pays row.

Who gets the trade

Three rules decide where the bytes go:

1. Your RPC and every extra RPC always get them.
2. A service that needs its own tip (Helius Sender, Nozomi, one of your routes with tip accounts) gets them only when the tip pays it. It would drop them otherwise, so sending would only cost you bandwidth.
3. Jito gets them when the tip pays Jito, or when the speed's also to Jito row is on. Untipped, Jito forwards them as a plain transaction.

With the default settings:

"One trade costs" is the network fee, the priority fee and the tip together, before the venue's own fee.

Minimum tips

Settings that stop a trade

Some combinations would get a trade dropped or waste its tip. While one of them stands, zeroterm refuses to send and tells you which, on the order card and with a ✕ in settings:

• The tip pays Helius Sender, but Sender is off.
• The tip pays Nozomi, but Nozomi is off, or has no API key.
• The tip pays Jito, but no Jito block engine is selected.
• The tip pays one of your routes that is off, has no tip accounts, or was removed.
• The tip is below the route's minimum.
• Helius Sender gets the trade with a priority fee of 0.

Anti-sandwich

With anti-sandwich on (the default), the tip lists Jito's jitodontfront account. Jito-connected leaders will not put a trade with that account into a bundle behind someone else's, which is how sandwiches are built. It rides on the tip, so a speed that tips nobody does not carry it.

Measure your routes

In settings, p times every route from your machine, twice: once cold, with connection setup, and once warm, over the open connection. A trade pays the warm time, because pressing b the first time already opens a connection to every route it will use. Nothing is sent: Helius Sender is asked on its /ping address, your RPCs for the current slot, and other services at their address.

Your receipts then show what each route did on real trades.

Choosing, by example

• Small trades, no rush. eco: about 0.0000155 SOL a trade, through Sender's SWQoS lane.
• A coin in its first minutes. turbo, or fast with a bigger tip. The tip is a bid, not a guarantee: when many people want the same block, the larger tips go first.
• You have a staked or paid RPC. Add it as your RPC or an extra RPC. Every trade goes to it at no extra cost.
• You use a landing service zeroterm does not list. Add it as your own route with its tip accounts, then set a speed's tip pays to it.