Bitquery Flags $117.7B, or 58%, of Solana DEX Volume as Circular or Bot-Like

Bitquery, a blockchain data provider, says 58.4% of the Solana DEX trading it indexed over 30 days was not real trading by its tests. Its investigation published on 23 September 2026 flags $117.7 billion of $201.4 billion in trades between 24 August and 22 September as circular or bot-like. About 95% of the flagged amount, $111.6 billion, came from one pattern: a wallet buying and selling the same token, in the same pool, inside a single transaction.

Bitquery calls the 58% a floor, and describes the label as a rules-based inference about trading patterns that makes no finding about anyone's intent.

How the rules classify Solana DEX trades as circular or bot-like

Bitquery counts a trade as not real when a wallet buys and sells the same token in one transaction and gets back about what it paid, less fees. It also flags wallets that trade one token back and forth at bot speed while losing or breaking even, and tokens where a few such wallets make up most of the trading. A round trip inside one transaction adds two trades and their dollar value to a pool's volume while the wallet ends up roughly where it started. It works like a till ringing up a sale and a refund for the same item: two entries in the ledger, and nothing leaves the shop.

The report lists its limits. It covered only pools priced in SOL, USDC or USDT, which leaves out trades between two unpriced tokens and is why Bitquery treats its total as a floor. About 3% of volume, routed through aggregators it does not index, was excluded. Bitquery identifies wallets by address only, not by who controls them. In a six-chain comparison published on 24 September, the firm adds: "On Solana we could run fewer of our checks than on the other five, so its share is the least tested."

Wallet clusters and company-named tokens behind the flagged volume

Two groups of wallets account for $26.3 billion of Bitquery's flagged total: 20 wallets that traded $7.18 billion across 224 tokens, and 50 wallets that traded $19.12 billion across 297 tokens. Bitquery does not say who runs either group.

Nearly half the flagged volume, $55.8 billion, ran through 1,562 tokens named after stocks, funds, AI companies and their products, according to Bitquery, including 254 separate tokens called "Anthropic". Bitquery's example transaction, on 14 September, involved a token called "Claude" with no connection to Anthropic: it generated $2,000 of volume in a pool with effectively empty reserves. CryptoSlate's follow-up found the same pool showing $0 liquidity on GeckoTerminal on 24 September.

A further 108 million trades fit what the report calls trade-count padding, about one in eleven of all the trades it priced, with nine in ten of them under $5.

PumpSwap volume and Solana Compass DEX data for the same window

Bitquery attributes $146.5 billion of its indexed volume, 72%, to tokens trading mainly on PumpSwap, the automated market maker run by Pump.fun.

Our own data puts the size of the market and its concentration in the same place. Over the same 24 August to 22 September window, Solana Compass DEX analytics record $202.7 billion in spot DEX volume across 1.13 billion trades, within 1% of Bitquery's indexed total. The PumpSwap program accounts for $144.8 billion of that, or 71%, and the next largest venue, Orca ORCA$1.66+6.1%, cleared $10 billion. Solana Compass figures count every swap and do not classify them, so they show where the volume sits and say nothing on how much of it is circular.

Why Bitquery, Solana Compass and DefiLlama totals differ

The three platforms count different pool sets, so their totals are not interchangeable. DeFiLlama counts only pools with specified quote tokens, at least $5,000 in total value locked and at least 50 unique traders, according to CryptoSlate, which put DefiLlama's total for the same period at $78.8 billion. Bitquery says DefiLlama records $18.4 billion for PumpSwap over the window against its own $146.5 billion, which covers most of the gap between the two totals. Of the three, Bitquery's is the only count that tries to separate circular trading from the rest.

The $83.7 billion of Solana DEX trading that passed Bitquery's tests over the 30 days is itself larger than DefiLlama's filtered total for the period.

Six-chain DEX comparison and Solana's trade-count milestones

Solana's flagged share was the highest of the six chains in Bitquery's comparison, ahead of BNB Chain at 36.9%, Base at 13.1% and Arbitrum at 1.5%. The dominant pattern differed by chain; on Solana it was the in-transaction round trip.

The findings bear directly on headline activity comparisons. On 21 September we reported that Solana DEXs logged 208 million weekly trades, above the NYSE's 189 million, a comparison built on raw trade counts, the same metric Bitquery's padding finding addresses. Our own count for the Bitquery window shows daily DEX trades climbing from 32.3 million on 24 August to a peak of 50.7 million on 11 September, while daily spot volume drifted from $7.5 billion to $6.4 billion.

We found no public response to the report from Pump.fun or the Solana Foundation as of 25 September 2026.