PropAMMs Now Handle Up to 30% of On-Chain DEX Volume, With Solana Accounting for 90% of Global Activity

Proprietary automated market makers have become a structural fixture of on-chain trading. A research report from DWF Ventures, the investment arm of trading firm DWF Labs, finds that propAMMs now account for between 15% and 27% of daily on-chain DEX volume globally, with peaks reaching 30%. Solana has emerged as the venue where almost all of that activity concentrates: DWF calculates that Solana hosts approximately 90% of all propAMM activity worldwide. Independent research published on the Ethereum research forum in July 2026 by Mike Neuder and Maryam Bahrani put propAMMs at approximately one-third of Solana's on-chain trading volume, drawing on DeFiLlama data.

On Jupiter JUP$0.238+0.5% (JUP), Solana's dominant swap aggregator, the concentration is sharper still. DWF estimates that more than 90% of daily SOL-stablecoin flow on Jupiter is now processed through propAMM venues, up from 35-60% of Jupiter's total daily volume by early 2025, per DWF Ventures. Total Solana DEX volume tracked by Solana Compass analytics ranged between $5.7 billion and $7.7 billion per day in the six days to September 13.

What PropAMMs Are: Closed Pools, Professional Firms, Off-Chain Pricing

A propAMM is a closed liquidity pool operated by a professional trading firm. Unlike constant-product AMMs where any depositor can supply funds, propAMMs accept no external liquidity providers. The trading firm manages inventory and pricing off-chain, then posts executable quotes on-chain into a pool structure only it controls.

The Solana-based propAMMs cited by DWF Ventures include SolFi, Obric, and ZeroFi, with FermiSwap, Metric, and Lifinity also operating in the category. According to Jump Crypto's analysis of propAMM architecture, each typically maintains a discrete tick book of around ten price levels around a continuously updated oracle midpoint. That oracle runs on a fixed cadence of roughly 100 milliseconds, with faster updates triggered when observed fair value moves past a configurable threshold.

Settlement remains fully public on-chain. Pricing algorithms remain entirely proprietary. Compass covered the technical mechanics of this model in depth in a Breakpoint 2025 talk by Chris Chang.

Jupiter and the Aggregator Concentration

The scale of Jupiter's propAMM routing concentration matters because Jupiter intermediates the majority of swap volume across Solana. When a single aggregator routes more than 90% of SOL-stablecoin flow through propAMMs, its routing decisions become the central arbitration point for which venues compete on price and depth.

CryptoSlate's analysis of the DWF report notes that this structure means "the router gains much more influence over the market." Aggregators route based on quoted price and available depth; propAMMs compete by posting tighter quotes. Because propAMM pools are permissioned, the set of venues an aggregator can access determines the competitive field rather than open market entry.

Execution Quality: How PropAMM Fills Compare to Centralized Exchange Costs

Independent research from Jump Crypto addressed whether users are getting good outcomes from propAMM routing. Jump's analysis of 20 million fills across SOL-USDC and SOL-USDT pairs during March 2026 found that the median propAMM fill was 0.72 basis points from the best available price across major centralized exchanges. Across that sample, 91.9% of propAMM fills beat the lowest institutional CEX fee tier, and 99.3% beat retail exchange fees. The combined propAMM volume in the sample, $19.87 billion in SOL-USDC and SOL-USDT, exceeded the aggregate of the top four centralized exchanges ($19.22 billion combined) during the same period.

Why Solana's Block Architecture Gives PropAMMs Their Speed Advantage

The technical conditions enabling propAMMs at scale exist on Solana and are only beginning to emerge elsewhere. Solana's Turbine block propagation protocol allows market makers to receive signals about block composition before a block is finalized, enabling repricing within a slot while it is still being built. That window runs to roughly 400 milliseconds in the current infrastructure, per Jump Crypto's research.

PropAMM oracles operating at 100ms cadence are structurally incompatible with Ethereum, where block times run to 12 seconds and quote updates can only occur once per block. This architectural difference is the primary explanation DWF Ventures gives for why Solana hosts 90% of global propAMM volume despite Ethereum carrying a larger total DEX market by dollar value.

Ethereum PropAMMs: $4.3 Billion Cumulative Volume but Far Behind Solana's Pace

DWF Ventures documents propAMM growth on Ethereum as well, but at a scale that illustrates the gap. Ethereum propAMMs generated approximately $300 million in daily volume in late August 2026, per DWF Ventures research, having grown from less than $7 million in cumulative volume in June to $4.3 billion cumulative by August. That trajectory is steep from a low base.

Proposals in the Ethereum research community have discussed 200ms block times and faster leader rotations as changes that could narrow the propAMM speed gap with Solana. For now, the slot-level repricing window Solana offers has given professional market makers a setup they have not been able to replicate at comparable scale on any other chain.

Settlement Is Public, Pricing Is Not: What the DWF Research Leaves Open

DWF Ventures frames propAMMs as a structural evolution alongside public pools, not a replacement of them. The report concludes that "each model has found the markets it is best suited to serve," with propAMMs taking liquid assets where professional firms can price tightly against centralized exchange references, and permissionless pools retaining long-tail assets and community-managed liquidity.

The question the research does not resolve is transparency. CryptoSlate's summary of the DWF analysis describes the current arrangement as "a blockchain everyone can inspect, wrapped around a trading desk almost nobody can see." Transactions are verifiably settled; the pricing decisions behind the quotes remain inside private models.

A Superteam podcast in November 2025 covered propAMMs when they handled close to 50% of Jupiter's total volume. DWF Ventures' September 2026 research extends that picture: from 35-60% of Jupiter's full-volume mix in early 2025 to more than 90% of the SOL-stablecoin subset today, with Solana accounting for nine-tenths of the category's global footprint.