Solana's Reported DEX Volume Hides Circular Trades and Automated Bots

Solana's decentralized exchange (DEX) volume has seen a significant spike, but new research suggests that much of this activity is driven by circular trades and automated bots.

A 30-day sample of Solana DEX trades flagged $117.7 billion in volume, with repeated round trips supplying most of the recorded turnover. However, this figure only accounts for about 58.4% of the total $201.4 billion in trades that could be valued in dollars across indexed Solana pools.

The majority of these flagged transactions involve buying and selling the same token through the same pool within a single transaction. A September 14 example shows how this can occur: a wallet bought a token named Claude from a PumpSwap pool, while another wallet sold nearly as many units back to that pool in the same transaction.

Bitquery's analysis identified two groups of wallets with similar trading records, accounting for $26.3 billion of the flagged amount. The firm grouped these wallets by their volumes and token counts, but did not trace their funding. Bitquery's volume total does not provide any measurements for liquidity available after repeated round trips are set aside.