Complete Guide to Start Streaming Shreds with GetShreds

Getting started with GetShreds takes about five minutes. This guide walks you through every step — from creating your account to receiving your first shreds and optimizing your setup for production use. Whether you are building an MEV bot, running a validator, or developing analytics infrastructure, the process is the same: sign up, subscribe, configure your endpoint, and start receiving shreds.

First, create an account on our platform using just an email address. No KYC documents, no lengthy verification, no credit card on file — we keep onboarding frictionless because we believe infrastructure access should not require bureaucratic overhead. After registering, you will receive a verification email. Click the link or enter the verification code to activate your account. Once verified, you can immediately log into your dashboard and activate a free one-hour trial to test shred delivery on your infrastructure before committing to a paid plan.

The free trial gives you full access to our shred stream for sixty minutes. This is enough time to verify that shreds are arriving at your server, check packet rates, and confirm that your processing pipeline can handle the data format. We recommend using the trial to benchmark your setup and compare shred arrival times against your existing RPC-based data sources. Many users are surprised by the magnitude of the latency improvement when they see shreds arriving 80-150ms before the equivalent data appears through RPC endpoints.

Next, choose the plan that fits your use case. The Standard plan at 3 SOL per month gives you access to a shared UDP shred stream — suitable for development, testing, and strategies that do not require the absolute lowest latency. For production MEV operations or validator setups that need guaranteed throughput and priority routing, the Dedicated plan at 8 SOL per month provides a dedicated UDP target with optimized network paths. If you just need short-term access for development sprints or testing, Dev Daily (0.15 SOL) and Dev Weekly (1 SOL) plans are available with no long-term commitment.

All payments are made in SOL directly from your wallet. You can pay using Phantom, Solflare, or any Solana wallet, or send SOL manually to the payment address displayed during checkout. The payment is verified on-chain within seconds, and your subscription activates immediately. No invoices, no payment processors, no waiting for bank transfers — just a direct blockchain transaction.

Once subscribed, head to your dashboard and enter the IP address and UDP port of the server where you want to receive shreds. Make sure your server's firewall allows inbound UDP traffic on the specified port. Our edge nodes will begin forwarding Jito-compatible shred data to your endpoint within seconds of configuration. You should see packets arriving almost immediately if your network is properly configured.

If you are running a Solana validator, configure your TVU (Transaction Validation Unit) port to receive shreds from our stream. The data format is compatible with Jito's shred format, so your validator will process them natively. If you are building a custom MEV pipeline or analytics system, simply listen on the specified UDP port and parse incoming packets. Each packet contains a single shred with standard headers including slot number, shred index, and shred type.

After shreds start flowing, use the dashboard to monitor your subscription status and connection health. We recommend testing with a single region first to establish a baseline, then expanding to multiple regions for redundancy in production. Running receivers in both Frankfurt and Amsterdam ensures consistent low-latency shred delivery regardless of which validator is currently the slot leader.

For optimal performance, co-locate your shred-receiving server in the same data center or region as our edge nodes. If your server is in a European data center with good connectivity to Frankfurt or Amsterdam, you can expect sub-millisecond network transit times for shred delivery. If your infrastructure is in a different region, expect additional latency proportional to the geographic distance, but the shred-level time advantage over RPC will still be significant.

If you encounter any issues during setup or want help optimizing your configuration, our support team is available via Telegram. Common setup issues include firewall rules blocking UDP traffic, incorrect port configuration, and NAT traversal problems. Our team can help diagnose connectivity issues and ensure your infrastructure is receiving shreds reliably.