Deep Dive into Solana DEX: Who is Snagging the Order Flow, Who's Getting Sidelined?

Original Title: Solana DEX Winners: All About Order Flow

Original Author: Carlos Gonzalez Campo, Blockworks Research

Original Translation: BitpushNews

Key Takeaways

- The dominant paradigm of Solana DEX will differentiate by asset maturity: Active Market Maker AMMs will continue to dominate short-tail high liquidity markets, while Passive AMMs will increasingly focus on long-tail assets and new token issuance.

- The winning strategies of the two types of AMMs are starkly different: Both can benefit from vertical integration, but in opposite directions. Passive AMMs are getting closer to the user through token issuance platforms (such as Pump-PumpSwap, MetaDAO-Futarchy AMM), while Active Market Maker AMMs extend downstream, focusing on trade execution services (such as HumidiFi-Nozomi).

- HumidiFi leads in the Active Market Maker AMM category, holding about 65% of the market share, with most of its trading volume concentrated in the SOL-USDC and SOL-USDT pairs. Its oracle update instruction cost is optimal within its peers and relative to passive AMMs, showing superior price spread performance compared to competitors like SolFi, Tessera, and others.

- The standalone Passive AMM model is outdated. The future winning "Passive AMM" will no longer be seen as a pure AMM but will become a token issuance platform that vertically integrates AMM as a profit layer—such as becoming a launchpad like Pump or an ICO platform like MetaDAO.

- DEXs that do not belong to either of the above types will face structural growth declines. Protocols that are neither Active Market Maker AMMs nor vertically integrated issuance platforms (most notably Raydium and Orca) are at a structural disadvantage and may become losers in this trend.

- Valuations should reflect both business quality and token value accrual. Multiples such as Price-to-Sales (P/S) only make sense in the context of growth prospects and a credible background of capturing token holder value. WET serves as a case in point: it appears to be undervalued compared to peers, but due to the uncertainty of long-term token empowerment, its trading price still carries a discount.

Foreword

In February 2025, we published a report on the Solana DEX competitive landscape. At that time, DEX trading volume was at an all-time high, and we (in hindsight) overly anchored to a 90-day rolling window that included the post-US election bounce in Q4 2024, the TRUMP meme coin frenzy in January, and the active period driven by LIBRA in February. Raydium was the leading DEX at the time, holding about 50% market share, with most DEX trading volume on Solana coming from meme coins.

Today, the landscape has fundamentally changed. The rise of active LP AMMs has reshaped the market structure, and trading volume concentration has shifted from meme coins to the SOL-USD pair. Although Lifinity pioneered the active LP AMM model, it wasn't until the launch of SolFi at the end of October 2024 that active LP AMMs began to surge, taking a significant share of trading volume in high liquidity pairs.

As active LP AMMs continue to dominate the fund flows of short-tail assets, passive AMMs are struggling, increasingly pushed towards long-tail assets and volume reliant on issuance. Pump's launch of AMM in March 2025 demonstrated this reliance: once Pump directed the graduation token to its proprietary AMM, Raydium lost its largest source of trading volume and revenue, leading to a continuous decline in market share. Since the liquidity of passive AMMs has largely been commoditized, the most likely surviving AMMs will be those that control issuance and order flow.

This report, based on this new market structure, reexamines Solana's DEX landscape, updates competitive positioning, valuation, and outlines our views on the protocols most likely to emerge as winners.

Professionalization: Short-Tail Assets vs. Long-Tail Assets

Solana's DEX dominance will continue to differentiate based on asset maturity.

Active LP AMMs will dominate short-tail assets (i.e., high liquidity markets), including SOL-stablecoin and stablecoin-stablecoin pairs.

In contrast, passive AMMs like Meteora and Raydium will remain more efficient in managing the liquidity of long-tail assets. Active LP AMMs are almost non-existent in this vertical as the risk of actively managing liquidity for new assets without real-time oracle price feeds is too high for them.

Order Flow: Execution vs. Issuance

Active Market Making (AMM) does not have a front end, therefore relying on aggregators such as Jupiter and DFlow to interact with its smart contracts and execute trades through its liquidity pools. In other words, active Market Making AMMs require aggregators to obtain order flow.

The chart below shows that over 95% of HumidiFi's trading volume comes from DEX aggregators, with other active Market Making AMMs like Tessera, GoonFi, and SolFi exhibiting a similar pattern.

On the other hand, passive AMMs account for less than one-third of the trading volume coming from aggregators.

Passive AMMs cannot compete with active Market Making AMMs in price execution for major assets and, as liquidity for long-tail assets has largely been commoditized, they must compete on an issuance channel.

In summary:

- Active Market Making AMMs must compete on price execution, with aggregators routing orders to venues offering the lowest slippage. As detailed in the subsequent report, transaction sequencing is crucial for active Market Making AMMs (akin to market makers) as they need to update quotes ahead of front-runners arbitrage. Therefore, active Market Making AMMs can benefit from downstream migration and focus on trade settlement services.

- Passive AMMs must compete on an issuance channel, meaning they need to engage in vertical integration, or they will gradually lose relevance. In contrast to active Market Making AMMs, passive AMMs need to get closer to users through token issuance platforms (e.g., Pump-PumpSwap, MetaDAO-Futarchy AMM).

We believe that a passive AMM that can survive long-term will ultimately no longer be considered a pure AMM. Their primary function will shift towards token issuance platforms—such as launchpads or ICO platforms—while the AMM itself will merely serve as an underlying tool for token issuance liquidity. Meteora is a possible exception, but its success is largely reliant on the traffic distribution brought by Jupiter. Below are several typical examples of this trend:

- Pump (Launchpad)—PumpSwap

- MetaDAO (ICO Platform) — Futarchy AMM

- Jupiter's DTF (ICO Platform) — Meteora

HumidiFi is the most prominent example of a vertically integrated active liquidity provision AMM, benefiting from the trade execution service Nozomi built by the same core team (Temporal).

An independent competitive analysis needs to be conducted on the fundamental differences between active liquidity provision AMMs and traditional AMMs.

Active Liquidity Provision AMM: The Dominance of HumidiFi

An active liquidity provision AMM is a spot exchange with active liquidity management through oracle updates. Each active liquidity provision AMM is operated by a single market maker (no external liquidity providers) using highly optimized trading to update the oracle price, enabling multiple price adjustments per second. With over ten active liquidity provision AMMs already live on Solana, they now represent over 50% of all spot trading volume on the chain.

As previously stated, Lifinity was the first active liquidity provision AMM, pioneering the concept of protocol-owned liquidity and price adjustments based on oracle updates. However, following the launch of SolFi by Ellipsis Labs (the team behind Phoenix) at the end of October 2024, Lifinity rapidly lost market share, with trading volume steadily declining. Lifinity ceased operations on November 20, 2025, a decision that underscored how fierce the competition in the active liquidity provision AMM space has become.

As shown in the chart above, SolFi held nearly half of the active liquidity provision AMM trading volume in the first and second quarters of 2025, but HumidiFi quickly rose to the top after its launch in June 2025. HumidiFi currently leads the active liquidity provision AMM trading volume with 65% market share, followed by Tessera (18%) and GoonFi (7%).

The core engineering team behind HumidiFi is Temporal, one of the most technically adept teams on Solana.

Temporal also operates other products at the infrastructure layer, including Nozomi (trade execution service) and Harmonic (a regional block-building system competing with Jito). In addition to Temporal's contributions, HumidiFi's co-founder Kevin Pang has prior experience at Jump, Paradigm, and Symbolic Capital Partners, bringing essential high-frequency trading expertise to this active liquidity provision AMM.

HumidiFi exemplified our point: unlike passive AMMs that need to migrate downstream and control end users to capture order flow, active LP AMM is better suited to migrate downstream, entering the trading, batching, and sequencing infrastructure space. Temporal's infra stack is highly complementary to HumidiFi, enhancing its ability for oracle update optimization computation use and trade execution.

Although HumidiFi has 18 active liquidity pools, approximately 98% of its trading volume comes from the SOL-USDC (83.3%) and SOL-USDT (14.4%) pairs.

CEX<>DEX Arbitrage Shifting On-Chain

According to Blockworks' Head of Data, Dan Smith, one of the most intriguing second-order effects of active LP AMM dominating SOL-USD trading volume is that CEX<>DEX arbitrage at the CEX leg is now shifting on-chain.

The past scenario was:

1. On-chain price is $120, Binance price jumps to $125.

2. CEX<>DEX arb bots buy on-chain and sell on Binance.

3. Arb bots capture a $5 difference.

The current scenario is:

1. On-chain price is $120, Binance price jumps to $125.

2. Active LP AMM swiftly updates its quote to reflect Binance's $125 price.

3. Arb bots can now atomically buy from on-chain venues with lagging quotes and sell to the active LP AMM.

4. Arb bots capture a $5 difference.

With both venues with lagging quotes and active LP AMM on-chain, arbitrage can now be atomically completed in a single transaction, reducing trader risk. As a result, the number of arbitrage bots utilizing flash loans to capture these opportunities has increased.

The chart below shows an extremely tight relationship between the percentage of DEX aggregator trading volume through active LP AMM (left axis) and the percentage of DEX aggregator trading volume belonging to circular arbitrage (right axis). Here, we define circular arbitrage as trades with identical input and output tokens, capturing the aforementioned arbitrage transactions.

Based on this trend, Active Liquidity AMM currently has higher trading volume than CEX on the SOL-USDC pair. The chart below shows that over the past four weeks, HumidiFi's weekly average SOL-USDC trading volume has exceeded 9 billion USD, surpassing Binance to become the largest exchange.

Oracle Progress

Active Liquidity AMMs adjust their pricing curves through oracle updates, making their quotes fresher compared to passive AMMs. Because the computational intensity of oracle updates is roughly 100 times lower than trading, liquidity providers in Active Liquidity AMMs can rapidly update their internal pool parameters multiple times per second, allowing them to offer tighter spreads than passive AMMs with aggregated liquidity.

These oracle update transactions are highly optimized to consume as few computational units as possible. As transactions in a block are prioritized by the fee paid per CU, lighter-weight oracle updates can get higher prioritization in the block for a lower total transaction fee. Transaction ordering is crucial as there is a race to update prices before frontrunning arbitrageurs. The chart below demonstrates that HumidiFi has significantly optimized its oracle update instructions, reducing the computation to 47 CUs, over an 85% decrease from the launch in June.

However, the chart above only considers the CUs consumed by the oracle update instructions themselves. A more relevant metric is the total CUs of a transaction because Active Liquidity AMMs rely on full transactions to update their oracles, including any additional program invocations and account processing overhead required to execute the update.

The table below shows that HumidiFi has reduced its oracle update transactions to <500 CUs, the lowest among its peers. Besides HumidiFi, only Tessera and GoonFi are below 1000 CUs.

While each oracle update transaction costs approximately 0.0016 USD, since reducing the total computation to below 500 CUs, HumidiFi averages around 6 million updates per day (approximately 70 per second!). At this rate, HumidiFi's daily expenditure on transaction bundling fees (base fee + priority fee + Jito tip) amounts to around 9,000 to 10,000 USD.

HumidiFi's Revenue

Although HumidiFi's revenue is not public, we can estimate it by observing the incremental token inventory since its inception. The core idea is that since HumidiFi essentially acts as a liquidity pool (in an active LP AMM where there is only one LP), every trade with it has a winner and a loser. Over time, the net inventory change of the liquidity provider reflects trade P&L. Therefore, we can track the cumulative net transaction volume of various tokens from HumidiFi's perspective as a proxy metric for its revenue.

The chart below shows HumidiFi's cumulative net transaction volume on SOL (where 98% of its volume is derived from), standing at around 25,000 SOL as of December 2, 2025. By measuring the daily changes in HumidiFi's SOL inventory and multiplying these balances by the daily SOL price, we estimate that from its inception in June 2025 to December 2, the cumulative trading revenue is approximately $4.1 million, equivalent to a daily average gross income of around $24,000.

The above method estimates on-chain trade P&L, but if HumidiFi hedges inventory on a CEX and funding rates, fees, and hedge P&L occur off-chain, there may be differences from actual net income.

Another important caveat is that the above estimate reflects gross income. After deducting the daily $9,000 to $10,000 oracle update fee, HumidiFi's implied net income is around $14,000 to $15,000 per day. Once again, it is emphasized that this is an estimate based on existing on-chain data. A more accurate income estimate would need to incorporate any off-chain hedging activities, as mentioned earlier.

Mark Price Delta Analysis: Active Liquidity vs. Passive Liquidity

Mark price delta is a measure of execution quality and back-running for liquidity provider adverse selection, which is a useful evaluation tool for active LP AMMs competing with the same strategy (providing delta-neutral order book top liquidity).

In this analysis, our data team focuses solely on SOL-USDC trades on HumidiFi, SolFi, and Tessera. Using a 30-second post-execution time interval, the on-chain trade price is compared to the Binance SOL-USDC midpoint price.

The P&L calculation formula is: `((Binance future midpoint price - Execution price) / Execution price) * LP direction * Trade volume in USD`.

Here, the LP direction is defined from the LP perspective: When an active LP AMM buys SOL (taker buys SOL from the LP) it is +1, and when an active LP AMM sells SOL (taker sells SOL to the LP) it is -1. Additionally, it should be noted that using the Binance mid-price as a reference may introduce cross-exchange basis risk and timing mismatch with on-chain execution, therefore the mark price delta should be interpreted directionally rather than as an exact decomposition of realized P&L.

The analysis period is from October 1, 2025, to November 22.

The cumulative positive P&L indicates that the LP executed soft/non-toxic flow and the price moved in favor of the LP within 30 seconds post-trade. Conversely, cumulative negative P&L indicates the presence of adverse selection, where the price moved post-trade in a direction unfavorable to the active LP AMM.

The chart below shows that during this period, the 30-second P&L of the active LP AMM is positive, indicating that these active LP AMMs successfully avoided toxic flow and captured spread from benign users. We also include aggregated data from passive AMMs on Solana, demonstrating that the mark price delta performance of active LP AMMs is significantly better than their predecessors.

SOL-USD Passive Liquidity: A Losing Game

Our mark price delta analysis shows that active liquidity management can shield funds from toxic takers attempting to profit from mispriced assets.

The ensuing conclusion is that the majority of trading volume on traditional passive AMMs for SOL-USD is not "organic" user flow but rather arbitrage aimed at outdated quotes. The curve of passive AMMs will always lag behind the fast-moving reference price in active LP AMMs. This lag creates a mechanical opportunity for arbitrage bots to intervene and trade against the passive liquidity pools when mispricing occurs.

Examining the trading volume composition of traditional AMMs, Orca still sees over 50% of its trading volume coming from SOL-stablecoin pairs. Meanwhile, both Meteora and Raydium (whose activities have been heavily skewed towards meme coins) have seen an increase in SOL-stablecoin trading volume in recent months, aligning with the aforementioned growth in arbitrage trading share.

Notably, newer AMMs like Pump's PumpSwap or MetaDAO's Futarchy AMM have not set up any active liquidity pools for high-liquidity pairs like SOL-stablecoin.

At a more granular level, the order flow diagram shown below illustrates that at least 85% of Orca's SOL-stablecoin trading volume can be attributed to 'MEV Bots' activity. However, most of the flow seems to be coming from Wintermute's public market-making bots rather than pure speculation arbitraging against stale quotes.

In the absence of incentives and assuming rational profit-seeking participants, over the next few months, LP capital for high liquidity pairs (SOL-stablecoin, stablecoin-stablecoin, BTC-stablecoin, etc.) on traditional AMMs will naturally shrink.

Nevertheless, traditional AMMs can still play a crucial role in tail assets. In particular, they serve as backstop liquidity that remains available even when active market-maker AMM liquidity withdraws under stress.

The Demise of Independent DEXs

While this is a report on DEXs, one of the key points we want to convey is that apart from active market-maker AMMs, the standalone DEX model is now defunct. Cryptocurrency investors have historically tended to analyze protocols in isolation, partially due to Ethereum historically yielding clear category winners: Aave in lending, Uniswap in DEX, Lido in staking, and so on.

It was natural to apply the same mental model to Solana, but it didn't stick. Firstly, Solana's competitive intensity vastly surpasses Ethereum, with few protocols able to sustainably dominate their verticals. Secondly, as we've shown throughout this report, Solana's market structure has pushed traditional passive AMMs towards tail assets where they can support initial liquidity and on-chain price discovery.

The issue is that DEXs have no moat, or at least not on their own. AMM liquidity has become increasingly commoditized, launching a new AMM with a fixed or concentrated liquidity pool is trivial. To win order flow akin to a traditional DEX, you must be closest to the end-user, meaning you must control the issuance channel, effectively becoming a token issuance layer.

Following this logic, we will no longer consider 'Spot DEX Winners' as DEXs but as token issuance platforms. This model can take two forms:

1. High-velocity launchpads for meme coins (e.g., Pump).

2. Create an on-chain capital formation ICO platform for more legitimate projects (e.g., MetaDAO, Jupiter's DTF).

Launchpad

We have extensively covered launchpads in the past, emphasizing the importance of controlling user relationships through a consumer-centric, mobile-first frontend. However, one point that we did not explicitly raise is that the rise of launchpads has disrupted passive AMMs almost as much as active liquidity provision AMMs, but through different pathways.

Active liquidity provision AMMs have captured market share of short-tail assets. Meanwhile, launchpads have become the token issuance layer for long-tail assets, controlling the issuance and order flow of these assets. Evidence of this disruption is that the three major passive AMMs on Solana (Raydium, Orca, Meteora) have all launched products related to launchpads in the past year.

Raydium:

In response to Pump launching PumpSwap AMM and diverting Raydium's graduation token flow, Raydium introduced LaunchLab, a white-label solution that allows integrators to easily create their launchpads. Raydium charges a 25 basis point platform fee on trades on any third-party launchpad built using LaunchLab, with graduation tokens redirected to Raydium's AMM.

Raydium's most prominent client is Bonk. While LaunchLab briefly recaptured some market share through Bonkfun in July 2025, Pump maintains dominance, holding over 90% market share. LaunchLab has recently gained back some share in the past few days, but historical patterns suggest that this growth is more likely to be sporadic than sustained without a clear structural catalyst.

Orca:

Orca has always struggled to capture significant share in meme coin trading volumes.

Since 2023, over 50% of its monthly trading volume has come from the SOL-USD pair, with the rest increasingly spread across project tokens, stablecoin swaps, BTC-USD, and LP tokens. This positioning has left Orca struggling over the past year: as Pump-fueled meme coin issuance accelerated in Q1 2024, it gave way to Raydium; and as active liquidity provision AMMs took over all short-tail liquidity, the protocol's key bullish theses were also undermined by SOL-USD and other high liquidity pair dominance. In July 2025, Orca launched the Wavebreak launchpad, with "proprietary anti-bot technology" as a marketing point, and DeFiTuna's TUNA as the inaugural offering. However, apart from initial attention post-launch, Wavebreak has seen little to no activity since late August 2025.

Meteora:

Meteora works closely with the Jupiter team and has become the on-chain transaction gateway for the majority of retail users. To expand its product range, Meteora partnered with Moonshot in August 2024 to introduce a launchpad.

In April 2025, Meteora introduced a dynamic bonding curve that captures 20% of transaction fees from the launchpad activity. Subsequently, the team onboarded new partners, including Believe, BAGS, and Jup Studio. However, Meteora's launchpad activity seems to follow a similar pattern to LaunchLab and Wavebreak. Despite a rebound in the second and third quarters of 2025 through token issuance, usage has plummeted since September.

Pump:

As mentioned above, Pump remains a dominant launchpad with a significant advantage.

We have extensively discussed this in previous research, so we will focus on the most interesting aspects here. Pump can be considered the first embodiment of vertical integration in DEX theory, built top-down from issuance rather than the reverse. After securing the issuance channel and order flow through its launchpad, Pump introduced its passive AMM to capture downstream trading activity. This integration significantly diversified Pump's revenue sources, no longer relying solely on the bonding curve mechanism. The figure below shows that Pump has now monetized activities across the entire token lifecycle, with AMM fees contributing over 20% of its total revenue.

ICO Platform

Over the past year, low-circulating supply tokens being penalized in the liquidity market and a more favorable regulatory environment have jointly driven the revival of ICOs. Unlike meme coin launchpads driven by high-speed token circulation, curated ICO platforms aim for sustained issuance but place greater emphasis on founder quality, reputation, and long-term retention of founders and investors.

MetaDAO:

We continue to uphold the argument for MetaDAO as the best-positioned protocol to win this market. As summarized in our September report: "MetaDAO is built from first principles, significantly different from other solutions in the market. Notably, MetaDAO is designed to address one of the most critical issues in the industry today: enforceable token holder rights."

Unlike a launchpad, MetaDAO does not have a bonded curve. Instead, it achieves ICO monetization through swap fees on its Futarchy AMM and its LP position on Meteora. The Futarchy AMM charges a 0.5% fee on trades, initially evenly split between MetaDAO and the fundraising project (e.g., 0.25% to MetaDAO, 0.25% to Avici). On December 28, following a mutual agreement with the team, the fee split was retroactively adjusted so that the full 0.5% now accrues to MetaDAO.

Since the launch of the Futarchy AMM on October 10, MetaDAO has generated $2.4 million in revenue, with approximately 60% coming from the Futarchy AMM and 40% from its Meteora LP position. MetaDAO may perhaps be the clearest manifestation of our "independent AMM extinction thesis." No one sees MetaDAO as an AMM. Nonetheless, the Futarchy AMM operates as the primary revenue layer of the protocol, benefiting from MetaDAO's control over the token issuance layer and its associated distribution channels.

Jupiter and Meteora:

On December 3, Jupiter launched its decentralized token formation platform, with the inaugural project being HumidiFi's WET. Projects issued through DTF must go through Jupiter's review and curation process, highlighting the difference in approach between high-velocity launchpads and curated ICO platforms.

The sale of WET is conducted in multiple stages on a first-come, first-served basis, with the pricing of the first two stages based on a $50 million fully diluted valuation, and the public sale at a $69 million fully diluted valuation. It is worth noting that Jupiter has indicated future issuances may explore alternative sale mechanisms. After the sale concludes, any remaining allocation will be subject to Jup Lock transparent locking and immediately used to establish a liquidity pool on Meteora from a portion of the sale proceeds to ensure token liquidity.

While Meteora's efforts in the launchpad space have not borne fruit, we believe its positioning is stronger than Raydium and Orca due to its relationship with Jupiter, possessing a better distribution channel and business development capability. For example, Meteora has been selected as the preferred venue for high-profile token launches like TRUMP or WLFI, despite the highly cyclical nature of the trading volume and revenue generated by such tokens.

Valuation Framework

While it is easy to value the Solana DEX token based on historical price-to-sales ratios, the actual value of such a comparison in isolation is limited. Simply labeling an asset as the "cheapest" in its class ignores the rapidly evolving nature of the Solana spot trading landscape, where forward growth will be determined by where trading volume consolidates, not where it has historically accrued. Therefore, understanding the direction of market structure is a prerequisite for any meaningful valuation analysis. Additionally, not all tokens are equal, as some tokens have stronger holder protections than others.

For investors looking to capture upside potential from the Solana spot trading landscape, we see two main paths:

1. Active LP AMMs, which should continue to consolidate their share in short-tail assets. While currently the SOL-USD pair is driving most of the volume, we expect active LP AMMs to also dominate other categories crucial to Solana's future relevance, such as tokenized stocks, in the coming months.

2. Token issuance platforms with a vertically integrated AMM, where the AMM serves primarily as the issuance's profit layer. Depending on investors' desired risk exposure, this bet can be expressed through a high-velocity launchpad (such as Pump) or an ICO platform that achieves on-chain capital formation (such as MetaDAO). Given the current market environment, we are more optimistic about the growth prospects of legitimate projects' ICO platforms.

Against this backdrop, we find it increasingly challenging to justify a bullish thesis in the long term for DEXs that do not fall into either of the above types (the most evident examples being Raydium and Orca).

Price-to-Sales Ratio

The chart below shows the circulating market cap-to-sales ratio multiples of the tokens discussed in this report. One initial noteworthy conclusion is that RAY and ORCA have become more expensive over time (revenue declining faster than valuation), resulting in their current P/S ratios of 10x and 14x, respectively. In comparison, PUMP and MET are trading at approximately 4x and 6x P/S, respectively, even though they are positioned more favorably in terms of issuance and growth prospects.

When estimating WET's price-to-sales ratio (P/S), we calculated HumidiFi's revenue by applying a 0.5 basis point (0.005%) fee on trading volume. While this assumption provides directional reference value in peer comparisons, the estimation is not entirely precise due to HumidiFi's actual spreads potentially fluctuating significantly with market conditions. Within this framework, HumidiFi's P/S ratio is approximately around 2x.

Meanwhile, META has become the most "expensive" token in its category with a market-to-sales ratio of around 36 times—this precisely confirms our stance that we should not make judgments based solely on historical multiples. Given that META has clear protections for token holders' rights and possesses forward-looking growth potential, it is reasonable for it to command a premium compared to non-equity tokens. We have previously released a forward-looking valuation model for META.

However, META's current market-to-sales ratio of around 36 times is far above its historical average level (around 15 times), indicating that the market is already digesting a series of recent catalysts. Over the past week, META has risen by about 40%, driving the expansion of the valuation multiple, while over the past month, due to a temporary slowdown in ICO activity, its recent revenue has actually fallen. Looking ahead, the following developments are expected to drive its revenue recovery:

- The fee split ratio of the Futarchy AMM has been increased from 0.25% to 0.50%;

- As per the Omnibus proposal, about 90% of META liquidity is migrating from Meteora DAMM v1 to Futarchy AMM;

- The upcoming Ranger ICO (scheduled to launch on January 6, 2026).

These catalysts, along with the soon-to-be-opened permissionless issuance and mechanisms like STAMP, are expected to help its market-to-sales ratio gradually fall back to a more stable range as revenue returns to growth track in the coming months.

Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) to Revenue Ratio

Based on fully diluted P/S, META and RAY are the most expensive in their category. For Raydium, given its more challenging future trading volume trajectory and the lack of enduring control at the issuance layer, we find it hard to justify its premium. In contrast, the multiples for MET, WET, and PUMP are the lowest in their category, at 12 times, 9 times, and 7 times, respectively.

Reverse Selection of Liquidity Tokens

Overall, the median P/S we observe is 8 times, and the fully diluted valuation/revenue is 15 times. While these multiples may seem relatively low on the surface, the main reason for the discount is the uncertainty surrounding token holder rights and supply dynamics.

Investors want to invest in fundamentally sound businesses but also want to be sure that holding the token provides ownership of the business. Specifically, they want to ensure that the team will act in the best interests of the project and token holders, and that the token has credible claims to the remaining cash flows, assets, and legal recourse.

We believe that META enjoys a premium compared to its peers as it is one of the few assets that simultaneously meets both these criteria: a fundamentally sound business and an investable token with credible value accrual. However, we expect that as revenue growth resumes its acceleration over the coming weeks, the current ~36x P/S multiple will converge towards ~20x. Otherwise, the recent price appreciation will find it increasingly challenging to justify its rationality based on fundamentals alone.

RAY is also an investable token. Raydium scored 38/40 in the token transparency framework, indicating full disclosure of its revenue sources, ownership and tokenholder rights, advisory service providers, and core team members. It also has high liquidity and the team programmatically buys back RAY with a 12% swap fee.

The issue with Raydium is that its high multiple relative to peers is fundamentally disconnected from its growth prospects. The pace of revenue decline outstrips the rate of its valuation decrease, and without clear structural catalysts, it is hard to argue that this trend will reverse. Notably, Orca faces a similar structural challenge as Raydium; while you can make the case for ORCA as an investable token, its growth prospects are similarly constrained.

One interesting observation is that besides ownership tokens, teams have communicated to the market that their sole credible signal of token conviction has been through buybacks (RAY, PUMP, ORCA, MET)—even though this is not the optimal capital allocation. Pump has spent approximately $230 million repurchasing around 17% of PUMP's circulating supply, yet the token's trading price still sits at around a 3x historical P/S. Meanwhile, Meteora has spent around $12 million repurchasing nearly 3% of MET's total supply, with the token's trading P/S ratio slightly higher at 5x.

Even if you present compelling arguments for Pump and Meteora in terms of their business growth prospects, both tokens face the challenge of proving the rationality of their discounted trading. Regarding Pump, it remains unclear how value is allocated between the token and equity for public market participants and whether token holders have rights to Pump's treasury. For Meteora, as part of team and ecosystem reserve allocations, around 7.2 million MET tokens unlock monthly, which could translate to selling pressure. For instance, based on the current $280 million valuation, these unlocks could potentially result in $2 million worth of selling pressure monthly.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges both these tokens face in proving the rationality of their discounted trading, RAY and ORCA trade at multiples of over 2x compared to PUMP and MET, yet with lower growth prospects. This might indicate a mispricing in the market, offering attractive opportunities for relative value pair trades.

Finally, HumidiFi's WET also faces a similar issue. HumidiFi is the leading and fastest-growing DEX on Solana; theoretically, WET is the sole liquidity avenue to actively market make an AMM position. However, investors have to (to some extent blindly) trust that the team will not rug the token.

In terms of token utility, users will be able to stake WET to receive fee rebates, with the team explicitly stating that "WET is not and should not be regarded as an investment." If the team aligns long-term with the token's interests, you can easily argue that WET is currently undervalued, despite its low circulating supply. However, the problem lies in the fact that market participants cannot determine whether WET is a meme coin or a investable token with credible value accrual. Hence, its trading price is lower than it could have been otherwise.

Nevertheless, considering Temporal's quality and track record as a long-term builder in the Solana ecosystem, we believe the team is more likely to pursue growth and value accrual consistent with WET. This is ultimately a subjective judgment and should be approached with caution. Nonetheless, on a risk/reward basis, we believe that at least in the short term, before the unlocking starts in June 2026, WET has more upside potential compared to RAY, ORCA, PUMP, and MET.

Risks

Each project we take a constructive view of has a set of unique risks, outlined below:

- HumidiFi: As mentioned earlier, the primary investment risk remains the lack of clarity in WET value accrual. Besides token design, there is also a risk to HumidiFi's competitive position in the actively market make AMM space. So far, HumidiFi has benefited from Temporal's deep technical expertise and vertical integration at the infrastructure layer. However, a decisive advantage of today's active market make AMM is on-chain composability: as both the venue and the actively market make AMM are on-chain, arbitrage can be atomically executed in a single transaction, significantly reducing execution risk. In this respect, Titan's recently introduced composable RFQ product may narrow the gap between RFQ and actively market make AMM, potentially exerting pressure on the latter's market share over the coming months.

- Pump: Setting aside the token issues discussed earlier, Pump's dominance in the high-velocity launchpad category is undisputed. A more pertinent issue is the sustainability of its revenue, with a common concern being that meme coins may be in a long-term decline. On-chain data shows that despite overall market weakness, revenue has held up over the past few days, hovering around $900,000 daily. However, this has also raised questions about data quality and sustainability. Current binding curve activity seems to still be healthy, with approximately 1-2 million transactions daily. Nevertheless, there is a growing skepticism about whether this demand might be externally subsidized, adding uncertainty surrounding the long-term revenue outlook.

- MetaDAO: While we remain bullish on META and believe MetaDAO is the most differentiated ICO platform, execution risk remains, especially around the issuance cadence. In our September baseline assumption, we expected approximately 5 ICOs per month. As of today, over a month has passed since the last issuance, with MetaDAO having had no ICOs in December 2025. Nevertheless, the Ranger ICO should reaccelerate revenue growth. The internal and public discussion within MetaDAO has been debating whether to maintain a fully curated model or attempt permissionless issuance. We believe that, despite the risk of lower project quality with the latter, it is a necessary experiment to increase throughput and validate platform scalability, and is likely the direction the team will ultimately choose. Additionally, we anticipate Colosseum's STAMP will bring MetaDAO a sustained, high-quality issuance volume, complementing the permissionless issuance.

- Meteora: While Meteora clearly benefits from Jupiter's issuance pipeline, a key subtle difference is that these two protocols maintain separate tokens. Therefore, the extent to which front-end-driven growth of Jupiter ultimately accrues to MET rather than JUP is not apparent. Even with a highly aligned team incentive, if Meteora still predominantly focuses on back-end liquidity infrastructure while Jupiter captures most of the user flow and interface-layer value, a lower multiple for MET may also be reasonable.

Final Conclusion

This report has mapped out the current landscape of Solana spot trading. The key conclusion is that we expect the market to continue to differentiate: active market maker AMMs will continue to dominate short-tail high liquidity markets, while passive AMMs will increasingly focus on long-tail assets and new token issuance.

Both active market maker AMMs and passive AMMs can benefit from vertical integration, but in opposite directions.

Passive AMMs are moving closer to the user side through token issuance platforms (such as Pump-PumpSwap, MetaDAO-Futarchy AMM); while active market maker AMMs are extending upstream into the supply chain, focusing on transaction settlement services (such as HumidiFi-Nozomi). The losers in this trend will be traditional AMMs that have limited control over end users and lack persistent issuance-driven order flow.

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