Solana DEX volume inflated by bots and circular trades, Bitquery finds
In brief
- Bitquery flagged $117.7 billion in circular Solana DEX trades inflating reported volume
- 58.4% of sample classified as bot-like or circular transactions
- Two wallet groups accounted for $26.3 billion of flagged trades
- Real independent trader depth remains unmeasured on Solana DEX dashboards
The volume doesn't match the depth
Bitquery flagged $117.7 billion in Solana DEX trades in a 30-day sample, where repeated round trips supplied much of the recorded turnover. The blockchain data company's rules classified 58.4% of that sample as circular or botlike. That's not a rounding error—it's a structural problem.
About $111.6 billion of the flagged amount (95%) involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside one transaction. Single-block round trips. No real price discovery. Just volume inflation.
Bitquery also identified two groups of 20 and 50 wallets with strikingly similar trading records. Together they accounted for $26.3 billion of the flagged amount. Coordinated wallets behaving like a single entity. That's not adoption. That's automation.
What the dashboards are missing
Compare this to what the public sees. A Sept. 24 snapshot of DefiLlama's Solana DEX dashboard showed $75.9 billion in rolling 30-day volume. DefiLlama's method counts pools with specified quote tokens, at least $5,000 in total value locked, and at least 50 unique traders. It's a sensible filter. It doesn't catch what Bitquery did.
Bitquery 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 numbers align when you strip out the bot noise. But the gap between gross volume and tradeable depth matters.
The real issue: Bitquery screens transactions and wallet behavior instead of relying on pool balance and trader count alone. Most dashboards don't. They count trades; they don't ask if those trades move the market or just move themselves.
A concrete example
One Sept. 14 example shows how the number can grow. A wallet bought a token named 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. Two dollars of real value. Two thousand dollars of reported volume. The exact Claude/SOL pool in Bitquery's transaction example displayed effectively empty reserves and $0 liquidity in a GeckoTerminal snapshot retrieved Sept. 24.
That's the trap. Volume inflates when bots trade with each other. Depth—the amount an independent trader could actually move without price slippage—stays flat. Solana's DEX ecosystem looks busier than it is.
