Proprietary AMMs Handle Over 90% of Jupiter's SOL-Stablecoin Trades, DWF Estimates

Proprietary automated market makers run by professional trading firms account for more than 90% of SOL-to-stablecoin trades routed through Solana aggregator Jupiter, according to an estimate from DWF Ventures reported by CryptoSlate.

Across on-chain DEX activity as a whole, DWF puts their share of daily volume at roughly 15% to 27%.

The aggregator is not the exchange

From a user's perspective, swapping SOL for USDC on Jupiter involves one screen, one price and one button. Underneath, Jupiter works less like a venue and more like a search engine for liquidity, comparing what different sources will offer and sending the order along the best route it can find.

Those sources include ordinary decentralised exchanges, proprietary automated market makers, known as propAMMs, and a request-for-quote (RFQ) network in which professional market makers compete to price an order.

That means the other side of the trade could be neither a fellow user nor a public pool backed by many depositors. It may be a trading firm deploying its own money through in-house pricing models, without any retail-facing exchange or a pool that outsiders can deposit into. Solana's own explainer describes today's propAMMs as generally closed-source, not open to public liquidity, and admitted to aggregators on a permissioned basis.

The numbers and who produced them

DWF also estimates that propAMMs account for up to 27% of weekly on-chain spot volume. The source matters: DWF Ventures belongs to DWF Labs, a firm that both makes markets in crypto and invests in the sector.

Other data also comes from interested parties. A Jump Crypto study of about 20 million propAMM fills from March compared them with prices on Binance, Coinbase, OKX and Bybit. For SOL-USDC, the median fill landed 0.72 basis points away from the centralised-exchange midpoint, and 91.9% came in below Jump's estimate of the cheapest institutional fee tier on those venues. Jump is a trading firm with commercial exposure to this market.

On Ethereum, 0x reports that for the USDC-WETH and WBTC-WETH pairs, its RFQ liquidity offers a better price than AMMs roughly 52% of the time.

Speed is part of the story. Ethereum runs on 12-second slots, while Solana reached its 300-millisecond target on 28 August. Faster blocks reward market makers that can update quotes quickly, and they raise questions about who sees information first. Blockworks Research examined HumidiFi, the transaction-landing system Nozomi and block builder Harmonic, which is associated with Temporal. It found that during certain periods HumidiFi's price updates reached Harmonic validators first much more often, an advantage that later disappeared.

Echoes of equity markets

The structure resembles US equity trading, where, as the SEC explains, brokers route orders among exchanges, electronic networks and market makers based on best available execution.

The overlap is becoming literal as traditional assets move on-chain. Nasdaq's venture arm agreed to invest $100m in Payward, Kraken's parent, and Nasdaq Equity Tokens are expected to launch in the second quarter of 2027, connecting with Payward's xStocks network. On 1 September, LSEG unveiled a tie-up with Payward covering tokenised listed shares. Pending regulatory sign-off, it aims to bring xStocks to LSE 24, its planned venue, during 2027.

Robinhood Chain hosts tokenised stocks as well. There, 0x's Stock Token implementation links apps with professional market makers via RFQ. USDG serves as its main base pair, and Tokka Labs is the lead maker.

What it means

None of this makes public AMMs obsolete. For long-tail tokens without deep reference markets, permissionless listing matters more than execution quality, and open pools remain the natural venue. For established assets with deep outside markets, such as SOL, ETH, Apple shares and Treasuries, professional market makers have the edge.

The trade-off is that influence shifts to routers. They decide which firms compete for an order, what information travels with it and how quotes are compared. Execution is becoming private even as settlement stays on-chain and public.

The headline percentages should be treated with caution given who produced them. The more durable point is that a form of trading barely present in most people's picture of DeFi now shapes some of its busiest markets.

Greater disclosure from aggregators on how propAMMs are admitted and ranked would make that shift easier to assess.