DeFi’s New Landlords
Decentralized finance once billed itself as a rebellion against financial elites. On Solana, the revolution is looking more like a surrender. Proprietary automated market makers (prop AMMs) – privately run liquidity engines operating without fanfare – are quietly capturing flow. They offer slick execution and narrow spreads, but at the cost of transparency and community control.
Opaque operators
The original DeFi model was open concept. Liquidity pools were public and anyone could deposit tokens and earn fees. Proprietary AMMs break from that egalitarian ideal. Instead of crowd-sourced capital chasing arbitrage, they encode market-making strategies directly into Solana programs. These pools behave like private trading desks: controlled, optimized and tuned for speed. Quoting happens inside Solana’s runtime rather than on external servers, cutting latency and squeezing out passive liquidity providers.
This architecture suits Solana’s strengths — high throughput, composability and negligible fees. It has already reshaped trading in stablecoins, where proprietary pools now dominate execution.
A Quiet Power Base
Prop AMMs’ rise has gone largely unnoticed because they shun publicity. Protocols with names like SolFi, ZeroFi and HumidiFi run without front-ends, governance forums or even documentation. Their operators are anonymous. Their code is closed. They are …
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