Bitquery’s six-chain audit has mostly been read as a Solana story, and the 58.4% figure earned that. The stranger finding sits on BNB Chain, where one contract carried about 5,500 wallets and more flagged trading than any other single move on that chain.
Between August 24 and September 22, Bitquery tested every DEX trade it could price in dollars across Solana, BNB Chain, Base, Arc, Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum. Of the $340.3 billion it examined, $144.1 billion, about 42%, did not pass.
An $8 Trade That Booked $2,170
On August 27, a Solana wallet paid 10.45 SOL for 20.2 million units of a token called UMIA in a PumpSwap pool. It sold 20.1 million of them back to the same pool for 10.37 SOL, all in one transaction. The wallet spent about $8 and Bitquery’s data recorded roughly $2,170 of trading. Nobody was on the other side.
That wallet sits in a cluster of 50 look-alike wallets. In one minute, 44 of them ran 116 of these round trips in UMIA, and over about a day the group made 164,419. A volume leaderboard counts every one of those trips as activity. That single pattern, per Bitquery, produced four-fifths of everything it flagged.
Six Chains, Very Different Numbers
Solana’s 58.4% sits on $201.4 billion of indexed volume. BNB Chain came in at 36.9%, Base at 13.1%, Arc at 8.0%, Robinhood Chain at 2.9% and Arbitrum at 1.5%. The five non-Solana chains together came to 19.0%, or $26.5 billion.
Bitquery admits Solana got fewer checks than the rest. Counting routed swaps as real would pull the share to about 57%, and catching round trips its rules missed would push it to about 62%. So even the generous reading leaves Solana above half.
The tricks change by chain. On BNB Chain, a fleet of roughly 5,500 wallets sending trades through one contract made 37.1% of the flagged trading. On Base, most of it was wallets buying from pools they had filled themselves.
A Few Wallets, Most Of The Volume
Concentration is the part that stuck with me. On Base, seven wallets passing USDC between them made 71.4% of the flagged trading. On Arbitrum, one bot trading the USDai stablecoin made 69.2%, though Bitquery says it found nothing linking that bot to the stablecoin’s issuer.
Arc is the sharpest case. Two wallets made 90.5% of what was flagged there. I covered Arc’s climb past Near last week, and this audit changes how I read it. Bitquery’s earlier Arc story found those two wallets behind about half of Arc’s volume on September 20. Across the full window, though, their trading came to about 7% of Arc’s volume, nearly all of it in the last eight days. Arc’s 8.0% is not the headline. The pattern is.
Bitquery also left $73.5 billion out of both sides of its count, because the loops were far bigger than the pools they ran through. Two wallets made 93% of that pile. One is the $33.8 billion loop wallet on BNB Chain. The other recorded $34.3 billion in six minutes on Robinhood Chain in a token named COBIE. Bitquery notes the name implies no connection to anyone called Cobie.
What The Number Can’t Tell You
Bitquery sells blockchain data, so read the framing with that in mind. Its index holds 1.7 times the volume DefiLlama reports for the same six chains, $203.1 billion. Remove what the tests flag and $196.2 billion remains, about 3% under DefiLlama’s figure. Bitquery itself calls that match partly chance.
The limits are real. This is one 30-day window, so it shows no trend. The classification is rules-based, which makes it an inference about trading patterns rather than a finding about anyone’s intent, and wallets are identified by address only. The pooled 42% of $340.3 billion leans heavily on Solana, so the per-chain figures are the ones to use.
Why A Volume Number Deserves Suspicion
Screeners and trackers rank tokens by volume, so a token with big volume looks busy and easy to trade. In my Bitget piece, the weak point was a system approving something it wasn’t actually looking at. Volume dashboards have the same flaw. Bitquery says its own data records these swaps like any other trade, and the audit only exists because someone pulled them apart.
Whether aggregators start doing that filtering themselves is what I’d watch next. Otherwise the number people use to judge a market will keep rewarding whoever spends $8 to fake $2,170.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. Follow us on X @nulltxnews
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