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No one cares but wants to share ☝️【In the corner where no one cares, the trading volume of several dark pools on Solana has quietly squeezed into the top ten】 Dark pools, also known as Dark AMM, Private AMM, Prop AMM, Dark pool, Proprietary AMM. They are usually very mysterious, with no front end, no website, no Twitter, no promotion, no visible team, and no discussions; a large amount of trading relies on aggregators to complete. In this context, HumidiFi (a Dark AMM that few people have probably heard of) has achieved the fourth highest trading volume in the Solana Program over the past seven days. However, after searching, there is basically no analysis of these Dark AMMs in the Chinese community (even a lot of CA and 广子 came up 😢), so I’m throwing out some ideas here to share a collection of content I found in the past few days. ⚠️ A bit long warning, I don’t know how many words it will be. It includes the following parts, and I will write them in several threads: 1️⃣ Core concepts of dark pools and their differences from traditional AMMs 2️⃣ How dark pools work and their advantages 3️⃣ What are the main dark pools in Solana DEX currently? 4️⃣ Characteristics of different dark pools in Sol, stablecoins, Memecoins, etc. 5️⃣ Dark pool trading process Walkthrough: before, during, and after 6️⃣ Extended content: The role of the emerging aggregator DFlow in dark pool trading on Solana 7️⃣ Future outlook (also known as the fantasies of retail investors) ———————————————— 🚩 1. Core Concept: What is Dark AMM? Dark AMM, also known as dark pool (Dark Pool), private AMM (Private AMM, PMM) or proprietary AMM (Proprietary AMM), is a new type of on-chain liquidity solution. Its concept originates from the traditional financial "dark pool." In traditional markets, institutional traders choose to match orders in non-public, anonymous "dark pools" to avoid large orders impacting market prices and exposing trading intentions. In cryptocurrency, this issue appears in a more adversarial form: MEV. The public mempool and transparent AMM pricing curves allow bots to easily extract value from ordinary users' trades through sandwich attacks and other methods. Thus, Dark AMM was born, and its essential difference from the traditional AMM (usually the x*y=k model) is: 1️⃣ Non-transparent pricing logic (Dark): The pricing curve of traditional AMMs is public and transparent, written into smart contracts, allowing anyone to predict the price after a trade. In contrast, the pricing logic of Dark AMMs is private and not disclosed. It’s more like a black box; you ask it for a price, and it gives you a quote. 2️⃣ Driven by professional market makers (Private/Proprietary): Dark pool liquidity usually does not come from retail LPs but is provided by a few professional market-making teams. This team uses its complex, off-chain market-making algorithms to determine pricing. 3️⃣ Active pricing: Traditional AMMs passively wait for traders to interact. Dark AMMs actively and continuously update their prices on-chain to respond to market changes. When we understand the traditional AMM mechanism, we often hear the "vending machine" theory, while Dark AMM is more like a professional trader watching real-time market conditions to quote prices for you. ———————————————— 🚩 2. How it works and advantages (just a glance, since we can’t do this anyway 😢) ⭕️ How it works: 1️⃣ Data input: Market-making teams combine off-chain data (like CEX) and real-time price feeds from on-chain oracles. 2️⃣ Algorithmic pricing: Their private market-making algorithms calculate competitive buy and sell prices and tradable depths based on the above data. 3️⃣ On-chain updates: Market makers continuously update these pricing parameters to the on-chain program. 4️⃣ Trade execution: When users initiate trades on DEX aggregators, the aggregator queries all liquidity sources (including various Dark AMMs) for prices. The Dark AMM program returns its current best quote. If its quote is the best among all sources, the aggregator routes the user's trade to it for completion. ⭕️ Business characteristics: 1️⃣ Abandoning the front end, focusing on the back end: Most Dark AMMs choose to forgo developing a user-facing front end, concentrating all resources on building the most powerful back-end pricing system. 2️⃣ Relying on aggregators: They completely outsource user acquisition, trade routing, and user experience to DEX aggregators like Jupiter. ⭕️ Core advantages: 1️⃣ Providing traders with better prices and lower slippage: Because market makers use complex models and compete in real-time, they can offer tighter spreads and better depths than generic AMM formulas, which is the direct reason they can execute trades. 2️⃣ Reducing market makers' "adverse selection" risk: Adverse selection is the biggest pain point for market makers. "Toxic order flow" leads to adverse selection for market makers, meaning that when market prices fluctuate sharply, informed traders (arbitrageurs) can always act first, causing market makers to trade at "old prices," resulting in losses. Dark AMMs can significantly reduce this risk through private logic and rapid price updates. 3️⃣ Higher capital efficiency: Professional market makers can dynamically manage their capital without needing to lock large amounts of funds in liquidity pools like traditional AMMs. ———————————————— 🚩 3. What are the main dark pools in Solana DEX? — HumidiFi, SolFi, Tessera V, ZeroFi, GoonFi, Orbic ⭕️ Currently, there are roughly three tiers: the first tier includes HumidiFi and SolFi, the second tier includes Tessera V and ZeroFi, and the third tier includes GoonFi and Orbic. I summarized their rankings, characteristics, and markets they excel in, as shown in the table below: ⚠️ Note: The star ratings come from this post (August 4) based on trading volume. They are categorized by different levels of trading volume, just to give readers a sense (no intention to belittle others) (seriously 👀) In addition, apart from the SolFi team we know developed PhoenixTrade, the teams behind other Dark AMMs are almost unknown (so mysterious!). Next, let’s look at some images to illustrate, mainly sourced from Dune ( ) and Blockworks (which charges a fee, but I have no money, so I directly used the images from the post). Images 1️⃣&2️⃣: From Dune created by EeKeyguy. The left image has already highlighted the trading volumes of six dark pools, among which HumidiFi's growth is the most significant. Additionally, the right image shows that dark pool (private) trading has reached about 30% of the total. If we look specifically at the Sol/stablecoin market (since it has the largest trading volume, and dark pools account for almost 50% or even more in Sol/stablecoin trading pairs), Blockworks' image (Image 3️⃣) is clearer and has a longer timeline👇 In mid-May, the only Dark AMMs in the market were SolFi and ZeroFi, which together accounted for about 50% of the Sol/stablecoin share. By mid-June, new Dark AMMs began to emerge, with HumidiFi showing the most significant growth (deep blue), while SolFi and ZeroFi's shares were eroded, especially SolFi. By early July, Tessera V (yellow) surged and grew rapidly. Now, HumidiFi has become the dominant player in the Sol/stablecoin market, with its recent seven-day trading volume ranking fourth in the Solana Program, only behind the Jup aggregator, Pumpfun AMM, and Raydium CLMM. A large number of trades rely on aggregators: as shown in Image 4️⃣, the vast majority of each Dark AMM's trades are executed through Jupiter. ———————————————— 🚩 4. Market segmentation: Different rules in different battlefields Dark AMMs exhibit different characteristics in different types of markets: 1️⃣ Mainstream market (SOL/USDC): This is the core battlefield, with trading volumes leading by a cliff. The competition here is the fiercest, dominated by top Dark AMMs like HumidiFi and SolFi. 2️⃣ Stablecoin market (like USDT/USDC): This is a highly specialized niche that requires handling ultra-low spreads and unique risk models, leading to players like Obric V2. 3️⃣ Meme coin market: More decentralized, but basically only concentrated on super-large Memecoins. Due to the numerous new coins, extreme volatility, and permissionless creation, traditional order books and AMMs still have strong vitality, with Dark AMMs occupying only a small share here. ⭕️ Why haven’t Dark AMMs been able to enter the small and medium Memecoin market? The reason lies in risk control, as for MM, risk control requires: 1️⃣ Oracles: One of the core risk control methods for professional market makers is to refer to reliable oracle prices. Newly issued small and medium on-chain tokens lack price feeds, making it impossible for market makers to price and hedge. 2️⃣ Hedging channels: Market makers bear the counterparty risk; they need to hedge their positions in other markets (like CEX spot or perpetual contract markets), and only large Memecoins have such hedging channels. 3️⃣ Controllable volatility: The extreme volatility and potential Rug Pull risks of low-quality coins are a nightmare for most market-making algorithms. ———————————————— (Upper part is finished, the remaining will be written in the next thread ✍️)