It’s a bit strange, really. For years, if you wanted to trade crypto tokens without a middleman, you’d probably use something called an automated market maker, or AMM. Uniswap is the big one most people know. The basic idea was pretty neat: instead of needing professional traders to set prices, anyone could just deposit their tokens into a shared pool and let a simple algorithm handle the trades. It was permissionless. Open to all.
But that openness came with a cost, I think. Because everything happens out in the open, the people providing that liquidity—the LPs—are kinda sitting ducks. Sophisticated bots can swoop in and snatch up value through what’s called MEV, leaving everyone else with worse prices and more slippage. It’s a well-known headache.
A Different Approach on Solana
Lately, a whole bunch of new trading venues on the Solana blockchain are trying a completely different tactic. They’re often called “prop AMMs” or sometimes “dark AMMs.” Names like HumidFi, SolFi, or Tessera. You haven’t heard of them? That’s the point. They don’t have a website or a frontend you can visit. There’s no pretty interface.
Their model is entirely different. Instead of relying on a crowd of users to supply liquidity, one single proprietary market maker funds a vault. All the trading happens against that. And because the order flow isn’t broadcast publicly, it’s much harder for those MEV bots to attack. The whole process is more shielded.
How Users Actually Find Them
So how does anyone actually trade on them? They don’t. Not directly. These prop AMMs plug into the backend of big aggregators—platforms like Jupiter or Titan that shoppers use to find the best price across all exchanges. The aggregator quietly checks the prop AMM’s price along with everyone else’s and routes the trade there if it’s the best deal. The user might never even know.
Chris Chung from Titan mentioned that when these first popped up, you had to integrate with all of them to compete. The first few had a real grip on the market. But now, with so many new ones launching, the overall share for prop AMMs is growing, but each new one has a smaller individual impact.
A Shifting Landscape for Trading
And that share is not small. Since the start of the year, prop AMMs have consistently handled somewhere between 13% and 24% of all monthly DEX volume on Solana. But that’s just the total. The real story is in the most popular trades.
For something like trading SOL against a stablecoin, prop AMMs are now dominating. Recent data shows they processed over half of all volume last week—billions of dollars. It’s a similar picture for stablecoin-to-stablecoin pairs. The interesting part is what’s *not* trading there yet: less established, illiquid meme coins. They still mostly live on the traditional, open AMMs. Though even that might be changing for the bigger meme tokens.
It feels like the market is splitting in two. One path for newer, riskier assets. And another, quieter, more efficient path for the stuff everyone’s already using.
