Solana DEX volume spike hides circular trades, and automated bots are blamed
Bitquery analyzed $201.4 billion in dollar-valued Solana DEX trades from Aug. 24 to Sept. 22 and classified 58.4%—about $117.7 billion—as circular or botlike. Most flagged activity involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool in one transaction. The firm also found groups of wallets with similar trading patterns, but did not trace their funding. Its findings apply only to indexed pools and its screening rules, and cannot be directly compared with DefiLlama totals because coverage and methods differ. The analysis raises doubts about treating gross turnover as evidence of independent-user demand or usable liquidity: the amount traders could execute at a given price remains unknown and requires pair-, size- and time-specific data.
