Solana DEX volume spike hides circular trades, and automated bots are blamed

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 Sept. 24 reconstruction challenges using gross volume as a stand-in for demand from independent traders.It leaves a question of how much an outside user could actually trade at a useful price in the same pools.From Aug. 24 through Sept. 22, Bitquery examined $201.4 billion in trades it could value in dollars across Solana pools it indexes. Its rules classified 58.4% of that sample as circular or botlike, and about $111.6 billion of the flagged amount (95%) involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside one transaction, according to its Solana analysis.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.Bitquery found that both signed it, and the two pool trades recorded about $2,000 of volume. The token name does not indicate a connection to Anthropic.Bitquery also identified two groups of 20 and 50 wallets with strikingly similar trading r...