Solana study finds wider spreads outside aggregators at five of six sampled pools

If you have been building on Solana for more than a week, you know the pitch: it is fast, it is cheap, and the liquidity is deep. But a recent study into round-trip spreads suggests that the way we access that liquidity is just as important as the liquidity itself. Specifically, if you are not using an aggregator, you are probably leaving money on the table.

The data from September looked at six major liquidity venues on Solana. In five out of those six cases, the spreads were wider when users went directly to the source rather than through an aggregator. This is not just a minor technical detail for traders; it is a fundamental shift in how the Solana stack is being built and where the value is actually accruing.

The Spread Problem

In simple terms, the spread is the difference between what you pay to buy an asset and what you get when you sell it back immediately. On a high-performance chain like Solana, you would expect these spreads to be razor-thin across the board. However, the study found that direct-to-pool swaps often suffered from inefficiencies that aggregators managed to bypass.

Why does this happen? It comes down to how liquidity is fragmented. Even on a single chain, liquidity is tucked away in different pools, versions of protocols, and varying fee tiers. When a user goes directly to a specific DEX interface, they are locked into that specific pool's math. Aggregators, on the other hand, act as a sophisticated routing layer that can split trades or find paths that the average user—or even a basic dApp—would miss.

The Aggregator Advantage

The fact that five out of six sampled pools showed wider spreads for direct users tells us that the "primary" markets are no longer the best place to trade. In the early days of DeFi, you went to Uniswap to trade on Uniswap. On Solana, the meta has shifted. You go to an aggregator to trade on the entire network.

For builders, this is a signal. If you are building a wallet, a game, or a portfolio manager, trying to integrate with individual DEXs is becoming a legacy approach. The aggregator layer has effectively become the "true" liquidity layer of Solana. It is the interface that abstracts away the messiness of the underlying pools.

What This Means for Founders

If you are a founder in this space, you need to look at this through the lens of user experience and retention. If your application routes trades poorly, your users are paying a hidden tax. In a world where every basis point matters, that is a fast way to lose your user base to a competitor who integrates a more efficient routing engine.

We are seeing the commoditization of liquidity pools. The DEXs themselves are becoming back-end infrastructure, while the aggregators are becoming the consumer-facing brands. This mirrors what we see in traditional finance: you don't care which specific bank provides the liquidity for your currency exchange at the airport; you just care about the rate you get at the kiosk.

• Efficiency is the only moat: If your protocol cannot offer the best price, it will eventually be routed around.
• Integration over isolation: Building a siloed ecosystem is a death sentence on Solana. You need to be where the aggregators can find you.
• The UI is the product: Since the underlying liquidity is accessible to everyone, the winners are those who build the best discovery and routing tools.

A Skeptical Note on Efficiency

While the study favors aggregators, we should remain slightly skeptical of the "perfect efficiency" narrative. Aggregators add a layer of complexity and, occasionally, their own sets of fees or latency. The study noted that while spreads were wider outside of aggregators, it didn't definitively prove per-swap savings in every single micro-scenario. Execution is still subjective to the exact moment of the trade.

However, the trend is undeniable. The "round-trip" test—buying and immediately selling—is a brutal way to measure liveness and depth. If the direct pools are failing this test more often than the aggregators, it means the searchers and bots that power the aggregator back-ends are doing a better job of maintaining price balance than the pools are doing on their own.

The Future of the Solana Stack

We are moving toward a modular future where the "liquidity provider" and the "trade interface" are completely decoupled. For a long time, we thought of a DEX as a website where you swap tokens. Now, we should think of a DEX as an on-chain smart contract that an aggregator's bot talks to so a human doesn't have to.

The liquidity is the commodity. The routing is the service.

As we head into the next cycle of growth, I expect to see even more specialized routing. We will see aggregators that focus on MEV protection, others that focus on privacy, and others that focus on purely the lowest possible slippage for stablecoin pairs. The "one-size-fits-all" swap is disappearing.

Takeaway for Builders

Stop trying to out-build the primary liquidity venues unless you have a radical new mathematical model for an AMM. Instead, focus on how your project interacts with the routing layer. If you are launching a token, ensure your liquidity is positioned where the major aggregators can easily index and route through it. If you are building a consumer app, don't reinvent the wheel—plug into the existing aggregator APIs.

The era of going "direct to consumer" for liquidity pools is ending. The middleman—in this case, the aggregator—is actually the one making the market more efficient for everyone else. It is a rare case where adding a layer to the stack actually lowers the cost for the person at the bottom of it.

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