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When thinking of Defi’s greatest innovations, automated market makers (AMMs) come to me.
Made popular by early OG teams such as Bancor and Uniswap in 2018, Amms made permission from permissionless liquidity supply without having to manage professional market makers.
This permissionless structure has enormous advantages for bootstrapping markets around illiquid tokens, but it comes with many well-known considerations.
Since liquidity positions and implementation are public, LPs are vulnerable to MEV attacks, which manifests itself in price effects and slip problems for the end user.
Over the years, protocol designers have tried to tackle these problems in different ways (for example, the concentrated liquidity or dark Polish of Uniswap V3). Others such as Hyperliquid have simply opted for the reliability of the design of the Central Limit Order Book (Clob).
In recent months, a wave of new AMM DEXs on Solana has mapped its own path to tackle these problems.
These DEXs are popularly referred to as prop (shortly before patented) AMMs or dark AMMs; They include players such as Humidfi, Solfi, Tessera, Zerofi, Goonfi and Obric.
You have probably never heard of these names, and that is because of design.
PROP AMMS do not use a frontend. They quote prizes private and trust in vault-based liquidity that is supplied by their own market maker in contrast to external liquidity pools.
By centralizing the liquidity supply in the hands of some to be centralized, this design choice PROMMs enables to protect the implementation of the command stream against MEV attacks by high-frequency traders to which public AMMs are susceptible.
How do Prop -amms find users? They simply connect to a DEX aggregator – such as Jupiter or Titan – on the backend, with which the aggregator can ask about DEXs for the best price quotes.
Almost all volumes of Prop AMMS are routed from Dex -Aggregators, according to the graph below.
Chris Chung, CEO and co-founder of Titan, told me: “Initially, when Prop AMMS was first launched, you had to be integrated with all to even have a chance to find the best route. The first three (Solfi, Zerofi and Obric) still had a struggle on the market.
“With the inflow of many new prop -ramms, the market share of Prop AMMS has remain, but every successive has seen less impact on the success of a router versus his colleagues.”
PROP AMM Dominance
Since January 2025, the volumes of the prop -ham consistently compile around 13% to 24% of the monthly DEX volumes.
Insulation data from volumes to very liquid trading couples, such as Sol-StableCoin, brings the growing use of prop-amms in a clearer view.
For Sol-Stablecoin volumes in the past week, Prop-Amm’s jointly processed ~ 53% ($ 7.42 billion) of all DEX volumes, per Blockworks Research Data.
Blockworks research data shows that a similar story arises on stablecoin pairs -Solfi and Obric have recorded ~ 50% of the $ 1.1 billion in trade volumes last week.
And as expected, illiquid assets such as Memecoins are still traded on traditional AMMs (there is a reservation: larger memecoins such as Popcat and Fartcoin appear on Prop -Ommmoutes).
Carlos Gonzalez Campo from Blockworks predicts that tokens will increasingly split into traditional AMMs versus prop -ms based on the maturity of assets:
