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DWF Ventures has published research showing that proprietary automated market makers now account for as much as 30% of on-chain decentralised exchange volume. On Jupiter, their share rises to more than 90% of SOL-stablecoin flow.
The findings point to a sharp shift in how some crypto trades are executed on-chain, with volume moving into closed liquidity pools that do not accept public deposits and are accessed mainly through aggregator routing rather than direct retail interfaces.
Proprietary automated market makers, or propAMMs, differ from traditional automated market makers in that professional trading firms manage pricing and inventory off-pool, then post quotes on-chain. Standard AMMs, by contrast, rely on static pricing curves and public liquidity provision, the model that has underpinned decentralised trading venues such as Uniswap and Curve.
PropAMMs currently represent between 15% and 27% of daily on-chain DEX volume overall, according to DWF Ventures. The firm estimated that Solana accounts for about 90% of propAMM activity, with the rest spread across Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain and other networks.
Solana lead
The report traced the model to earlier experiments, including Lifinity, before a newer group of venues emerged in the second half of 2024. It identified SolFi, Obric and ZeroFi as the platforms that established the current structure of proprietary pools with no public front-end and no retail deposits.
By early 2025, those venues were routing 35% to 60% of Jupiter's daily volume, the research found. Jupiter is one of Solana's main swap aggregators, directing orders across multiple liquidity sources in search of the best price.
DWF Ventures argued that Solana's network design has given these firms an advantage that is hard to match on Ethereum. PropAMMs depend on cheap, frequent quote updates to avoid stale pricing, and Solana lets market makers reprice during a slot while blocks are still being built.
Ethereum's longer block times make that more difficult because market makers are generally limited to updating once per block, the research said. That raises the cost and risk of running the model on Ethereum and other Ethereum Virtual Machine-based networks.
Even so, the report pointed to growth outside Solana. In the last week of August, daily Ethereum swaps handled by propAMMs such as FermiSwap and Metric reached just under USD $300 million, while cumulative volume rose from less than USD $7 million at the start of June to USD $4.3 billion this month.
Asset split
The research said the strongest gains for proprietary pools have come in large-cap volatile token pairs against stablecoins, especially SOL-USDC and ETH-USDC. On Jupiter, more than 90% of daily SOL-stablecoin flow is now processed by propAMMs.
The report argued that traditional AMMs are more exposed in fast markets because their pricing curves adjust only after trades move pool reserves. That can leave liquidity providers open to losses when traders exploit stale prices before arbitrage closes the gap.
By posting updated quotes on-chain before the next trade, propAMMs can keep prices closer to external markets, DWF Ventures said. It cited Jump Crypto analysis of SOL-USDC and SOL-USDT trading on Solana, which found the median propAMM fill was 0.72 basis points from the best available price across major centralised exchanges.
That analysis also found the median fill was 1.85 basis points cheaper than the lowest institutional fee tier on a centralised exchange, with more than 90% of fills beating the cheapest institutional tier and more than 99% beating standard retail exchange fees.
Still, the report said the model has limits. Proprietary pricing works best when there is a dependable external reference price or enough trading history to support a pricing model, it argued.
That leaves room for traditional AMMs in less liquid tokens and newly listed assets. Because anyone can provide liquidity and create a market without relying on an oracle, inventory model or dedicated market maker, standard AMMs remain the main venue for long-tail assets and new token launches.
Stablecoins and RWAs
DWF Ventures said stablecoin trading presents a more mixed picture. On Solana, it estimated that propAMMs have captured close to 30% of daily stablecoin swap volume, but traditional AMMs still dominate the segment and remain the leading venues on Ethereum.
The report said that reflects the importance of deep liquidity and low slippage in stablecoin trades, where price stability matters more than reacting to volatility. It also noted that traditional AMMs have adopted designs tailored to these pairs, including Curve's StableSwap model.
Looking beyond crypto-native assets, DWF Ventures said tokenised real-world assets are likely to split along similar lines. Treasuries, commodities and large-cap equities may favour proprietary pools because larger participants are likely to seek tighter pricing and deeper liquidity, while smaller and newer tokenised assets may still depend on permissionless listing models, the firm argued.
The report concluded that proprietary AMMs are taking market share rather than replacing traditional AMMs outright. Each model is proving more effective in different parts of the market, with Solana so far emerging as the main base for proprietary on-chain market making.
Neither design is being replaced; each model has found the markets it is best suited to serve.