Unveiling Solana's "Invisible Whale": How Proprietary AMMs Are Reshaping On-Chain Trading

The rapid rise of proprietary AMMs on Solana is no coincidence, but rather a logical—even inevitable—evolution in the DeFi market’s pursuit of ultimate capital efficiency.

Written by: Lacie Zhang, Bitget Wallet Researcher

Within the Solana ecosystem, renowned for its high speed and low costs, we are witnessing the accelerated emergence of a new trend: a group of “invisible” giants—proprietary automated market makers (Proprietary Automated Market Makers, hereinafter referred to as “proprietary AMMs”) that have no official websites and do not engage in publicity, are rising rapidly. They are reshaping the trading landscape in a more professional and efficient manner, becoming the new engine driving on-chain capital flows. In this article, Bitget Wallet Research Institute will take you into this silent revolution, analyzing the logic behind the rise of proprietary AMMs and their impact on the industry.

Invisible Giants: The Operating Logic of Proprietary AMMs

Image source: Helius

According to statistics from Blockworks, in August 2025 alone, proprietary AMMs on Solana processed approximately $47 billions in spot trading, accounting for 31% of the total DEX trading volume on the Solana chain. This trend is even more remarkable in high-liquidity trading pairs such as SOL-stablecoins—since May 2025, proprietary AMMs have consistently accounted for over 60% of the monthly trading volume in SOL-stablecoin pairs, and their share in stablecoin-to-stablecoin pairs can be even higher.

Source: Blockworks Research

To understand this transformation, it is first necessary to clarify the definition of proprietary AMMs. Simply put, they are a type of on-chain market maker operated by a small number of professional teams using their own funds, and do not provide liquidity access to ordinary users. This stands in stark contrast to traditional AMMs such as Uniswap: traditional AMMs allow anyone to become a liquidity provider (LP) and earn fees, achieving “crowdsourced” liquidity; proprietary AMMs, on the other hand, return the power of market making to professional teams, focusing everything on ultimate efficiency and risk control, with the following operational characteristics:

• Invisible entry: Most proprietary AMMs have no user-facing website, and ordinary users cannot interact with them directly.
• Algorithm secrecy: Market making algorithms and parameters are strictly confidential, with significantly lower transparency than traditional AMMs.
• Aggregator reliance: They obtain trading orders by directly connecting to aggregators (such as Jupiter), which match users’ trading requests to the platform offering the best quote.

Comparison table of proprietary AMM and traditional AMM operating models

Note: A few proprietary AMMs (such as Lifinity) provide a user frontend, but their liquidity still mainly comes from team-owned funds, and trades are still executed via routing to aggregators.

This business model is built purely on execution efficiency, not brand or community. Traditional DeFi projects need to invest heavily in marketing and community building to attract users and liquidity. In contrast, proprietary AMMs convert all their “marketing budget” into tiny price advantages for users in trades, ultimately capturing massive trading volumes. This also indirectly proves that the DeFi market is maturing, with market participants behaving more like rational economic agents—following the principle of “best price wins”—rather than being mere idealists obsessed with “decentralization above all.”

Conceptual Distinctions: “Dark Pools” or “Proactive Market Makers”?

With the rise of proprietary AMMs, related terms such as “Dark AMM” and “Proactive Market Maker (PMM)” have also appeared frequently, making it crucial to clarify their differences. In fact, these three concepts are not mutually exclusive, but rather differ in their definitional focus.

• Dark AMM: The core is information concealment. It describes a trading method that hides order intent during the matching phase, aiming to reduce information leakage and price impact.
• Proactive Market Maker: The core is proactive pricing. It refers to dynamically adjusting quotes through the introduction of oracles, active inventory management, etc., in pursuit of higher capital efficiency.
• Proprietary AMM: The core is fund ownership and operating entity. It defines a model where the operating team uses its own funds for market making.

Definition table of the three AMM concepts

After clarifying the definitions, it is not difficult to see that these three concepts are not mutually exclusive, but describe different dimensions of the same financial entity. In fact, a typical proprietary AMM, in pursuit of ultimate efficiency and security, usually adopts a “dark pool” trading mode, and its pricing strategy (though not public) is most likely “proactive.”

Therefore, although mainstream media sometimes mix these terms, the term “proprietary AMM” gets to the root of the matter from a fundamental logic: who controls the funds, and who bears the risk. Compared to terms describing technical features such as “Dark AMM” or “Proactive Market Maker,” “proprietary AMM” more accurately reveals the essence of this new force from the perspective of business model and operating entity.

Efficiency Revolution: Why Is Solana the Ultimate Testing Ground?

The rise of proprietary AMMs stems from their precise targeting of the core pain points of traditional AMMs. The passive design of traditional liquidity pools inevitably leads to high slippage in the face of large trades, and they are long plagued by impermanent loss and MEV attacks (such as sandwich attacks). Proprietary AMMs, through refined management by professional teams and proactive quoting strategies, have almost perfectly solved these problems. They can offer users tighter spreads, lower slippage, and more stable trading results—especially for large swaps, the experience is now almost indistinguishable from top centralized exchanges.

All of this is inseparable from Solana’s unique blockchain architecture. First, Solana’s high throughput and extremely low transaction fees make this “proactive” model, which requires frequent quote updates, economically viable. Second, the dominance of aggregators (especially Jupiter) in the Solana ecosystem has created a “one-stop distribution channel” for these market makers. They do not need to build their own brand, website, or user community, and can focus all resources on their only core competency—execution and pricing. This extreme professional division of labor greatly simplifies their business model and reduces operating costs.

In other words, proprietary AMMs did not simply choose Solana; they are themselves a symbiotic, native market structure with Solana—a perfect example of the co-evolution between the high-performance architecture of the underlying public chain and the business models of upper-layer financial applications.

Future Outlook: The Wave of Specialization and the “Ghost” of Centralization

The rise of proprietary AMMs signals that on-chain markets are moving toward a more professional and more polarized direction, and a clear “dual-track market” will gradually form.

• Mature asset markets: High-liquidity trading pairs such as SOL-stablecoins will increasingly be dominated by proprietary AMMs capable of providing the tightest spreads.
• Long-tail asset markets: Newly launched meme coins and the like will continue to rely on permissionless traditional AMMs such as Raydium for early price discovery and liquidity guidance.

This trend is a victory of mechanism efficiency, marking a profound wave of specialization in on-chain market making. The market structure is shifting from open, crowdsourced liquidity to specialized market making by a few teams, greatly improving the execution efficiency and security of on-chain trading and setting a new industry benchmark.

But on the flip side, there is the concern about the “ghost” of centralization re-emerging. While users enjoy better execution quality, they are also, perhaps unknowingly, making a trade-off and sacrifice: exchanging DeFi’s core principles of high transparency, permissionlessness, and decentralization for ultimate efficiency. When most order flow is directed to a few anonymous “black boxes,” although transactions are still settled on-chain, the lack of transparency in the process undoubtedly introduces new trust risks and weakens the auditable foundation on which DeFi is built.

From a broader perspective, the dominance of proprietary AMMs is reshaping and consolidating Solana’s ecological positioning. It further strengthens Solana’s image as the “Nasdaq of blockchains”—a venue tailored for high-performance, institutional-grade financial applications, with execution speed and capital efficiency as the highest standards. This gives Solana a differentiated advantage in the public chain race, making it the preferred deployment platform for innovative protocols seeking both CEX-level performance and a DeFi core.

Conclusion

The rapid rise of proprietary AMMs on Solana is no coincidence, but a logical—even inevitable—evolution in the DeFi market’s pursuit of ultimate capital efficiency. Although it has sparked important discussions about the future of decentralization, this proactive and efficient liquidity provision model has already taken industry performance to new heights. Regardless of how the final landscape evolves, this silent revolution has already written the prologue for the next chapter of on-chain finance.