58% of Solana DEX Volume Flagged as Botlike or Circular Trading

Bitquery classified 58.4% of its $201.4 billion Solana DEX sample as circular or botlike trading in a 30-day window ending Sept. 22, with $117.7 billion of the flagged turnover involving repeated round trips across indexed pools. The blockchain data company's Sept. 24 reconstruction challenges using gross volume as a stand-in for demand from independent traders.

95% of flagged volume was same-token, same-pool round trips

About $111.6 billion of the flagged amount, or 95%, involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside one transaction. The remaining 5% covered other patterns Bitquery's rules captured.

Bitquery also identified two wallet clusters of 20 and 50 addresses with similar trading records. Together they accounted for $26.3 billion of the flagged amount. The firm counted only trades priced in SOL, USDC or USDT in pools it indexes, and it says fewer of its checks could run on Solana than on the other chains it studied.

A $2,000 example from PumpSwap

Bitquery's case study is a Sept. 14 transaction on a token named Claude. One wallet bought Claude from a PumpSwap pool while a second wallet sold nearly as many units back to that pool inside the same transaction, recording about $2,000 of volume. Bitquery found that both signed it. The token name does not indicate a connection to Anthropic. The exact Claude/SOL pool displayed effectively empty reserves and $0 liquidity in a GeckoTerminal snapshot retrieved Sept. 24.

DefiLlama's number, and why the two tallies don't match cleanly

A Sept. 24 snapshot of DefiLlama's Solana DEX dashboard showed $75.9 billion in rolling 30-day volume. Bitquery made a same-date comparison: $83.7 billion of its indexed Solana trades were outside its flagged category, while DefiLlama counted $78.8 billion across the chain for Aug. 24 through Sept. 22.

Bitquery described the close totals as partly coincidental: DefiLlama includes venues Bitquery misses and excludes pools Bitquery keeps. On PumpSwap, DefiLlama's method counts pools with specified quote tokens, at least $5,000 in total value locked, and at least 50 unique traders. Bitquery screens transactions and wallet behavior instead; a pool balance and a count of trading addresses alone cannot show whether those addresses represent separate users.

A separate paper finds a 2.97x edge via HumidiFi

A paper accepted at ASE 2026 examined 200 addresses tied to the top 100 Trojan and top 100 SolanaMevBot addresses, with transactions collected from Oct. 1 to Nov. 1, 2025. A 12-address cluster at the center of the profit-rate comparison routed heavily through Jupiter and also invoked proprietary AMMs including HumidiFi.

Transactions that invoked HumidiFi recorded a positive WSOL balance change 62.3% of the time, against 21.01% for other transactions in the same group. The comparison covered 244,733 HumidiFi-invoking transactions (152,502 with a positive WSOL change) and 218,678 other transactions (45,949 with a positive change), for a rate ratio of about 2.97. A separate 102-address trading-operations cluster concentrated 80.9% of its activity on the Pump.fun ecosystem.

What SOL holders can and can't read off this

The $117.7 billion figure applies to indexed pools and rules, and Bitquery's flagged share reflects activity in one window, not a rate for all Solana DEX trading. The spendable depth left for independent users remains unmeasured, which is the figure that matters for execution.

A protocol-level breakdown of the flagged $117.7 billion beyond PumpSwap references (shares for HumidiFi, Raydium, Orca and other venues) is not in the reconstruction as reported, and Bitquery's exact rule thresholds for classifying trades as circular or botlike are not quoted. A SOL holder reading Solana DEX volume as a demand signal needs both before treating gross turnover as a proxy for independent activity.