Solana DEX volume inflated by circular, bot-driven trades

Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery analyzed trades on Solana decentralized exchange pools it indexes from Aug. 24 through Sept. 22 and flagged $117.7 billion of activity as circular or bot-like within that 30-day window. The sample covered $201.4 billion in dollar-valued trades across the indexed pools.

Under Bitquery’s screening rules, 58.4% of the valued trades were classified as circular or bot-like. About $111.6 billion of the flagged total-roughly 95%—was generated by transactions that both bought and sold the same token through the same pool inside a single on-chain operation.

The analysis grouped wallets by trading volume and token counts and identified two clusters of addresses, one of 20 wallets and another of 50 wallets, whose similar activity accounted for $26.3 billion of the flagged volume. The firm did not trace the funding sources for those wallets.

Bitquery highlighted a Sept. 14 transaction involving a token named Claude and a PumpSwap pool as an example. In that operation, one wallet purchased tokens from the pool while a second wallet sold nearly the same number of units back to the pool within the same transaction; both wallets signed the transaction and the two trades recorded about $2,000 of on-chain volume. A snapshot of the same Claude/SOL pool on Sept. 24 showed effectively empty reserves and zero reported liquidity.

The sample was limited to trades priced in SOL, USDC or USDT and only included pools covered by Bitquery’s index. Other quote assets and routed venues were outside the sample, and fewer of Bitquery’s automated checks could run on Solana than on some other chains. The $117.7 billion figure reflects the activity flagged under the firm’s rules for that specific set of pools and dates, not the total rate of all on-chain DEX trading on Solana.

Bitquery compared its screened totals with a separate DEX-volume dashboard for the same Aug. 24–Sept. 22 window. The firm reported $83.7 billion of its indexed trades remained outside the flagged category, while the other dashboard counted $78.8 billion for the chain over the same dates. The difference arises because the services include and exclude different pools and venues. One aggregator’s method counts pools that have specified quote tokens, at least $5,000 in total value locked and at least 50 unique traders; Bitquery’s method filters transactions and wallet behavior instead. A pool balance and a count of trading addresses do not establish whether those addresses represent independent users.

Bitquery’s analysis also noted that gross volume is not a direct measure of tradable liquidity. Available execution depth for a new order depends on the specific token pair, the trade size and the exact timestamp. Swap routing services typically show a quoted expected output and then an actual execution result; prices can move between quote and execution. Historical volume totals and fee aggregates do not indicate the price impact a new order would face.

The report stated that estimating usable DEX liquidity requires pair- and size-specific fills across comparable venues and that the share of volume that independent, non-automated traders can execute at useful prices remains unmeasured.