Introduction
In February, we published a report analyzing Solana's DEX landscape. The competitive dynamics at the time led us to conclude that the leading DEXs observed competitive advantages by narrowing their focus to a specific asset type (e.g., memecoins, SOL-USD pair) compared to those with a more neutral positioning. The emergence of new players (SolFi, PumpSwap) that have gained significant market share over the past few months reinforces and enables us to refine this thesis.
Moreover, our previous report did not cover aggregators, a crucial piece of the trading stack that sits closer to the end user. While Jupiter has historically dominated this vertical, becoming the go-to gateway to trade on Solana, the rise of meta-aggregators (Titan, Kamino Swap) can make the swapping landscape more competitive and threaten Jupiter's quasi-monopoly. This report analyzes two of the most interesting trends in Solana's DEX and aggregator landscape today:
- Specialization at the DEX layer. In our view, DEX dominance will increasingly bifurcate based on asset maturity:
- Long-tail assets (e.g., new memecoins) will be dominated by traditional AMMs like Raydium and Pump.
- Liquid markets (e.g., SOL-USD pair) will be dominated by “prop AMMs” (SolFi, ZeroFi) and offchain venues (Pyth’s Express Relay).
- Meta-aggregators like Kamino Swap and Titan improve price execution for users and make the swapping landscape more competitive, with Jupiter incorporating meta-aggregation into Juno, its latest routing engine. These platforms route trades across third-party aggregators, such as Jupiter, OKX, and DFlow, as well as off-chain sources like Pyth's Express Relay. In Titan's case, the team has also developed their own routing algorithm, Talos.
Blockworks Intel