Most Solana DeFi trades now go through professional market makers using private pricing, shifting control from public liquidity pools to Wall Street-style dealers and changing the user experience of decentralized trading.
If you swap tokens on Solana's main DeFi platforms, chances are your trade is handled by a professional market maker running proprietary algorithms-not the open, public liquidity pools that once defined DeFi. This isn't just a trend. DWF Ventures reports that over 90% of SOL-to-stablecoin trades routed through Jupiter, Solana's top liquidity aggregator, now pass through proprietary automated market makers (propAMMs) run by professional dealers.
Private pricing in public markets
For SOL-USDC trades routed through Jupiter, 91.9% of executions were cheaper than the lowest institutional fee tier on centralized exchanges, with median pricing just 0.72 basis points from the CEX mid-price.
The original AMM model allowed anyone to provide liquidity and trade against a public pool, but it struggled with stale pricing and rebalancing losses. PropAMMs, on the other hand, use private software and inventory to set prices that track the market more closely. These dealers often offer better prices than centralized exchanges, but their pricing logic is not public.
So while trade settlement is still public and verifiable, the way prices are set and orders are routed is now mostly hidden. Professional market makers can compete without revealing their strategies, creating a hybrid system: blockchain transparency at settlement, traditional finance secrecy at execution.
Institutional influence and tokenized assets
Solana has reclaimed the lead in daily DEX volume, reaching approximately $3.25 billion on September 12, 2026, distributed among Jupiter, Raydium, and Orca. This surge underscores why routing and execution layers on Solana are now central to industry discussions.
For established tokens with deep liquidity, professional dealers now set prices and handle most trades. Public AMMs are still used for illiquid or new tokens without reference markets. This split is likely to continue as DeFi matures: professional market makers will handle most volume for major assets, while public pools serve the rest.
Changing user experience and market structure
For most users, the process is simple: enter a trade on Jupiter and get a price. But behind the scenes, private actors with Wall Street backgrounds increasingly shape the execution. The separation of public settlement from private execution brings new trade-offs. Users get tighter spreads and lower slippage on major pairs, but lose visibility into how prices are set and who controls liquidity.
This isn't unique to Solana. Other blockchains and aggregators are adopting similar models, with more request-for-quote systems and off-chain order books. The trend raises questions about what decentralization means when professional dealers control most trading, even if settlement stays on-chain.
Recent governance debates in DeFi, like the Aave DAO's move to give Risk Stewards emergency freeze powers, show how protocol control and market structure are getting more complicated as institutions enter the space. As reported earlier, the balance between transparency, control, and user protection is still being worked out across leading protocols.
DWF Ventures estimates that propAMMs now account for 15% to 27% of daily on-chain DEX volume on Solana. On busy days, this share can spike higher, especially for major pairs like SOL-to-stablecoin. These numbers show a structural change in how liquidity is sourced and priced, with professional market makers now setting the terms for most trades.
DeFi's original promise was open, permissionless access to liquidity and transparent price discovery. The reality is now more complicated. As professional dealers take over the execution layer, users get better prices but less insight into how those prices are set. This isn't a temporary phase-it's the new normal for DeFi trading on Solana and, increasingly, on other networks. The industry's talk about decentralization now faces a practical test: can DeFi stay meaningfully open when most trading is routed through private, institutional actors? For now, efficiency and user experience are winning out over radical transparency, and the market seems content to let Wall Street's playbook run quietly in the background.
PropAMMs mark a real shift in DeFi's structure. Unlike public AMMs, where anyone can provide liquidity and all pricing is visible, propAMMs use private inventory and proprietary algorithms. This lets professional market makers adjust prices quickly as markets move, reducing arbitrage and stale quotes. But it also means users and outside observers can't easily check how prices are set or whether spreads are fair. As DeFi platforms keep evolving, the trade-off between transparency and efficiency will stay central for users, developers, and regulators.
