Bitquery Flags $117.7B in Solana DEX Volume as Botlike and Circular Trades
Bitquery found that 58.4% of a $201.4 billion Solana DEX trading sample was driven by circular or bot-driven activity, raising questions about actual market depth for independent traders.
Blockchain data company Bitquery identified $117.7 billion in Solana decentralized exchange activity as circular or bot-driven across a 30-day sample. The findings, published Sept. 24, analyzed $201.4 billion in indexed dollar-denominated volume between Aug. 24 and Sept. 22.
According to Bitquery, 58.4% of the examined trades met its criteria for circular or botlike execution. Roughly $111.6 billion, representing 95% of the flagged total, involved wallets buying and selling the same token inside the exact same pool within a single transaction.
A concentrated set of addresses generated a significant share of that activity. Bitquery spotted two clusters of 20 and 50 wallets with matching patterns that collectively drove $26.3 billion of the flagged sum, grouping them by volume and token counts without tracing wallet funding.
In one Sept. 14 trade highlighted by the firm, a wallet purchased a token named Claude on PumpSwap while a second address sold nearly the identical amount back into the pool in the same transaction. Both participants signed the transaction to generate about $2,000 in volume, with Bitquery noting the token name has no connection to Anthropic.
Bitquery pointed out that its dataset only evaluated pools paired with SOL, USDC, or USDT, leaving out other quote assets and select routed venues. The firm also acknowledged running fewer checks on Solana than on other chains it studied, meaning the figure reflects its specific rules and timeframe rather than the rate across all Solana DEX trading.
The study presents a different picture than standard tracking dashboards. A DefiLlama snapshot taken Sept. 24 showed a rolling 30-day Solana DEX volume of $75.9 billion, while its Aug. 24 to Sept. 22 count reached $78.8 billion across the network, close to Bitquery's $83.7 billion in unflagged trades.
Bitquery described the alignment between those two figures as partly coincidental due to differing coverage. DefiLlama monitors PumpSwap pools by screening for specific quote tokens, at least 50 unique traders, and a minimum of $5,000 in total value locked, whereas Bitquery focuses directly on transaction flows and wallet behavior.
The research emphasizes that high reported turnover does not necessarily indicate usable depth for outside traders. The specific Claude/SOL pool evaluated from the Sept. 14 example showed $0 in liquidity and empty reserves on GeckoTerminal by Sept. 24, leaving incoming traders with no meaningful depth despite earlier trading activity.
Bitquery did not measure executable liquidity, leaving usable depth for independent users undetermined. Neither recorded turnover nor fee tables on DefiLlama and PumpSwap show the price impact of a particular order, while Jupiter swap documentation shows that quoted expected output can shift before execution when prices move.
Other sectors on Solana also function under separate trading conditions. An April publication from Jump Crypto examined March fills in SOL and stablecoin pairs run through proprietary automated market makers, representing a distinct market segment from the PumpSwap pools Bitquery flagged.
