Solana DEX Trades Include $117.7 Billion in Circular or Botlike Activity

A rules-based review classified $117.7 billion, or 58.4%, of $201.4 billion in indexed Solana decentralized-exchange trades as circular or botlike activity between Aug. 24 and Sept. 22, highlighting the limits of gross volume as a measure of market depth.

The review covered trades priced in Solana (SOL), USD Coin (USDC) or Tether (USDT). The flagged amount is a floor rather than a complete estimate because the sample excluded other quote assets and swaps routed through venues outside the index.

About $111.6 billion, or 95% of the flagged activity, involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool within a single transaction. Other patterns included repeated back-and-forth trading at botlike speeds and activity concentrated among small groups of similar wallets.

One transaction at 4:47 a.m. ET (08:47 UTC) Sept. 14 showed one wallet buying about 61 million units of a token named Claude while another sold nearly the same amount back to the same PumpSwap pool. The transaction recorded about $2,000 in volume. Anthropic had no role in issuing the Claude token and was not connected to it.

A group of 20 wallets made about 8,600 similar round trips involving the token in roughly one hour. Two wallet clusters accounted for $26.29 billion of the flagged volume. The 20-wallet group generated $7.18 billion across 224 tokens, while the 50-wallet group generated $19.12 billion across 297 tokens.

The review also identified $55.8 billion in flagged activity across 1,562 tokens named after stocks, funds, artificial-intelligence companies or related products. Names such as Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI and AAPL do not establish a connection to the companies or products named.

The analysis does not establish who controls or funds the wallets, whether the activity was unlawful wash trading or whether any named company was involved. Similar wallet behavior may indicate common automation, but ownership and funding were not confirmed.

Indexed volume outside the flagged category totaled $83.7 billion. That figure was compared with $78.8 billion for the entire Solana chain over the same dates, although the datasets cover different venues and pools. A separate rolling 30-day measure lists $75.868 billion in Solana DEX volume, covering a different period and coverage set.

Including unindexed swaps as legitimate activity was estimated to reduce the flagged share to about 57%.

The review separately counted 108 million small trades that were not included in its dollar-volume estimate. Nine in 10 were below $5, increasing transaction counts without representing comparable dollar turnover.

Gross DEX volume measures turnover, not how much an independent trader could buy or sell without moving the price. The review did not measure executable liquidity, price impact or realized fills, leaving the depth available to separate traders unquantified. That distinction follows an earlier TokenPost comparison of Solana and New York Stock Exchange trade counts, which noted that transaction totals do not measure capital, liquidity or exchange revenue.