A sharp rise in trading volume on Solana decentralized exchanges conceals circular trades, and automated bots are being blamed.

Bitquery said it flagged $117.7 billion in Solana decentralized exchange trading volume over a 30-day window, with much of the recorded turnover coming from repeated round trips rather than clear independent demand. The blockchain data company's Sept. 24 reconstruction puts a question mark on a metric that markets often read as simple trading appetite: if a large share of volume comes from wallets buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside one transaction, the headline number may overstate how much activity outside users can actually trade at useful prices.

Why the number matters more than the ranking

From Aug. 24 through Sept. 22, Bitquery examined $201.4 billion in trades it could value in dollars across Solana pools covered by its index. Its screening rules classified 58.4% of that sample as circular or botlike. Of the flagged amount, about $111.6 billion, or 95%, involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside a single transaction.

That pattern matters because trading-volume dashboards usually measure gross activity, not economic necessity. A pool can show large turnover while the trades are largely recycled through the same contract and the same venue. For a reader comparing Solana platforms, the practical question is not only how many dollars changed hands, but whether those dollars came from separate users seeking exposure, or from wallets whose trading behavior looks repetitive and programmable.

Bitquery's example from Sept. 14 shows how small transactions can become part of a large total. It described a wallet buying a token named Claude from a PumpSwap pool, while a second wallet sold nearly as many units back into that same pool in the same transaction. Both wallets signed the transaction, and the two pool trades recorded about $2,000 of volume. The company noted that the token name does not indicate a connection to Anthropic.

The analysis also pointed to two groups of wallets, one with 20 members and another with 50, whose trading records were strikingly similar. Together, those groups accounted for $26.3 billion of the flagged amount. Bitquery grouped the wallets by their volumes and token counts, without tracing their funding.

Why this does not equal a full Solana volume census

The $117.7 billion figure is bounded by Bitquery's own data coverage and rules. The company counted trades priced in SOL, USDC or USDT in pools covered by its index. Other quote assets and some routed venues fell outside the sample, and Bitquery said fewer of its checks could run on Solana than on other chains it studied. Its figure therefore reflects the activity its rules flagged in one window, not a universal rate for all Solana decentralized exchange trading.

A comparison with DefiLlama shows why different dashboards can point in similar directions without measuring the same thing. A Sept. 24 snapshot of DefiLlama's Solana decentralized exchange dashboard showed $75.9 billion in rolling 30-day volume. Bitquery's window ended two days earlier, so subtracting the flagged dollars from that dashboard total would combine different dates and different pools.

Bitquery also offered a same-date comparison. It said $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. The company described the close totals as partly coincidental, because DefiLlama includes venues Bitquery misses and excludes pools Bitquery keeps. The $83.7 billion is a remainder under Bitquery's rules, and the independent-user share within it remains unknown.

The difference between pools, users and liquidity

DefiLlama's published method for PumpSwap counts pools with specified quote tokens, at least $5,000 in total value locked, and at least 50 unique traders. Its adapter code implements those thresholds. 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.

This is why the competitive signal changes after screening. A venue may lead a turnover table while a portion of its recorded activity comes from wallets repeatedly crossing the same pool. At the same time, trades left outside Bitquery's screen remain unclassified by that test. Neither dashboard gives a matched measure of orders an independent trader could execute without substantial price movement.

The example pool also shows how volume history and available depth can diverge. The exact Claude/SOL pool in Bitquery's transaction example displayed effectively empty reserves and $0 liquidity in a GeckoTerminal snapshot retrieved Sept. 24. Its prior trading record could still be large while a new trader faced no meaningful liquidity there at the time of that snapshot.

To test whether liquidity is usable, a reader needs more than a volume total. The relevant execution test needs a token pair, trade size and timestamp. Jupiter's swap documentation describes a quoted expected output followed by an actual execution result, with prices able to move before a quote is used. Bitquery said that estimating liquidity available after repeated round trips are set aside would require historical reserves, comparable routes and realized fills for flagged and unflagged pools. Its volume total alone supplies none of those measurements.

What Solana's next liquidity question is

The investigation also placed token pools beside other Solana markets. Jump Crypto's April publication examined March fills in SOL/stablecoin markets run through proprietary automated market makers. Jump participates in that market, and Bitquery said those results cannot describe execution in the PumpSwap token pools flagged in this analysis. One segment's results should not determine the chain's liquidity standing.

Fees can offer another incomplete shortcut. DefiLlama's chain-fee table tracks a separate measure from PumpSwap's liquidity-provider, protocol and creator fees. Neither recorded turnover nor any of those fee totals tells a trader the price impact of a particular order.

For readers, the takeaway is that Solana decentralized exchange activity needs a closer look at who generates it and where. Bitquery's $117.7 billion figure applies to indexed pools and rules, while the spendable depth left for independent users remains unmeasured. Solana's competitive position on execution will depend on pair- and size-specific fills across comparable venues, not on gross volume alone.