Three Web3 Trend Indicators You Should Watch: Analyzing Jito BAM, BRC2.0, and EIP-7999

The Web3 landscape is constantly evolving, and tracking emerging protocols is essential for understanding where the industry is headed. This trend indicator breaks down three significant developments reshaping blockchain infrastructure and transaction processing.

Jito BAM: Redefining Transaction Ordering on Solana

The Core Innovation

Jito’s BAM represents a fresh approach to transaction sequencing on Solana. Think of it as an order-arrangement system operating behind the scenes—it takes transactions destined for a block and organizes them strategically before validators process them. This differs significantly from how Ethereum pursues PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation), but achieves similar goals: creating fairer transaction ordering and reducing MEV exploitation.

Why This Matters

Solana validators currently occupy about 90% market share through Jito’s auction platform, giving the initiative substantial influence. The supporting cast reads like a who’s who of Solana: Triton One, SOL Strategies, Figment, Helius, Drift, and Pyth are all participating. This isn’t a fringe experiment—it’s coordinated action from official players and ecosystem leaders.

The pressure behind BAM is clear: Hyperliquid and similar order-book chains are eating into Solana’s narrative advantage. These competitors excel at market-maker operations through native design. BAM offers Solana a workaround: if you can customize transaction sequencing within blocks, you can optimize for DeFi without fundamentally redesigning the protocol.

How It Functions

Solana produces blocks linearly—one 400ms slot contains 64 time segments, each sending transactions immediately. BAM changes this by processing entire block order in a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) first, applying plugin-defined rules before submission to validators. One practical example: an oracle platform could hardcode “price updates always execute first,” eliminating randomness from delayed pricing data. A DEX could filter high-probability failures, reducing wasted fees.

The Reality Check

TEE infrastructure is expensive and limited to roughly thousands of transactions per second. Scaling this for Solana’s throughput demands multiple TEE clusters, adding complexity and outage risks. Jito’s Q2 2025 earnings—22,391 SOL (~$4M)—suggest the economics aren’t compelling yet. The real value proposition appears narrow: high-value, deterministic-guarantee transactions. But “narrow” might be exactly right for initial adoption.

BRC2.0: Programming Bitcoin Without Changing Bitcoin

The Concept

BRC2.0 launches September 2, 2025, as a curious hybrid: users write transaction instructions on Bitcoin via inscriptions or commit-reveal schemes, triggering an EVM runtime in an indexer layer (not on-chain, no consensus). Fees are denominated in BTC, but computation executes in a “magically modified” Ethereum Virtual Machine. Similar to Alkanes (which uses WASM), but targeting EVM developers.

The Positioning

Bestinslot, which gained prominence during Bitcoin’s inscription boom, is driving this. The narrative premise: add programmability layers without altering Bitcoin’s core consensus. In the past 24 months, everyone has chased “BTC programmability” stories, but actual engineering solutions were slow arriving. BRC2.0 and Alkanes represent this year’s first serious attempts at practical implementations.

Mechanics Under the Hood

EVM logic executes in the indexer—not a separate chain, not Bitcoin itself, but a hybrid zone with no consensus protocol. User-controlled EVM addresses are hashed from Bitcoin addresses and mapped to virtual equivalents. It mirrors BRC20’s JSON-based control logic but executes arbitrary bytecode.

A significant technical risk: preliminary audits found no call-depth or recursion limits in node code, meaning theoretically, an infinitely recursive contract could crash the VM (though adding such protections is straightforward).

Market Assessment

Naming strategy is smart—“BRC2.0” inherits visibility better than an entirely new protocol name. However, the protocol design owes more to philosophical alignment with BRC20 than direct technical inheritance. More importantly, Bitcoin’s greatest strength isn’t programmability—it’s scarce, fixed supply demand mechanics that can’t be valued on PE ratios like other assets. Adding complexity might actually erode what makes Bitcoin valuable. This raises a philosophical question: should Bitcoin prioritize universal applications, or defend its unique value proposition as a limited-resource consensus network?

EIP-7999: Ethereum’s Multi-Dimensional Fee Market Solution

The Problem It Solves

After EIP-4844 introduced blob data, Ethereum’s fee structure fractured. Transactions now negotiate separate prices for execution, calldata, and blobs. Layer 2 developers face a nightmare: setting independent fee caps for each dimension. If one parameter drifts too low, transactions fail despite adequate total fee budgets. Wallets and routers experience “disjointed experience”—the system feels broken to end users because it technically is fragmented.

Vitalik’s Answer

EIP-7999 (renamed from EIP-0000) proposes unified fee markets: users set a single max_fee parameter, and the EVM automatically distributes this budget across different resource types (execution gas, blob gas, calldata gas). This elegantly solves the dimensional pricing crisis that’s plagued Ethereum since calldata was first priced differently (0 vs. non-zero bytes in 2015).

Implementation Complexity

The proposal introduces a new transaction type with consolidated fee fields—structurally cleaner than earlier attempts like ERC-4337, which suffered from over-engineering. However, implementation requires changes to block headers, RLP encoding, validation rules, and chain-wide wallet support. Every node must parse these transactions, even if individual wallets opt out.

Timeline and Impact

Short-term implementation is unlikely—likely 1-2 major hard forks away. But Vitalik’s accompanying economic analysis reveals sophisticated thinking about long-term fee market dynamics. Success here unlocks simpler L2/L3 architecture designs and positions Ethereum’s fee structure for another decade of scaling.

Conclusion: Three Glimpses of Web3’s Next Phase

These three trend indicators represent distinct scaling philosophies: Solana pursuing order-book fairness, Bitcoin experimenting with programmable layers, and Ethereum systematizing fee markets. None are silver bullets, but collectively they signal where the industry’s engineering focus is concentrating. Watching their adoption curves will reveal whether technical elegance translates to market traction.