BisonFi executes trades on-chain, but its operator retains control over pricing strategies, fund management, and program upgrades.
By angelilu, Foresight News
An unfamiliar name has taken the top spot on Solana’s seven-day trading volume rankings.
On October 26, the DefiLlama rankings showed that BisonFi had processed about $2.03 billion in trading volume over the past seven days, surpassing Pump at $1.782 billion, Orca at $1.486 billion, and Raydium at $1.089 billion. BisonFi ranked first on the list during this period.
Image source: Lince
But users looking to learn more may find it difficult even to verify the project’s website or official Twitter account. Unlike many DeFi projects, BisonFi also does not attract retail users to provide liquidity through a public deposit portal.
There has also been some confusion about who is behind BisonFi. Early reports linked it to Forward Industries, a Solana treasury company, but Forward Industries has issued a statement denying that BisonFi is one of its projects. As a result, clear public information about the team actually operating BisonFi remains scarce.
BisonFi is a Prop AMM, or proprietary automated market maker. Here, “proprietary” means that the market-making team uses its own funds and assets to trade with users. The team sets quotes, adjusts its inventory, earns the spread between buy and sell prices, and bears losses caused by price movements.
Users mainly access BisonFi through aggregators. According to 30-day data shown on a Dune dashboard, 46.8% of BisonFi trading wallets traded primarily through DFlow, and 43.9% traded primarily through Jupiter v6, for a combined total of about 90.7%. Users choose the aggregator, but BisonFi may be the protocol that actually handles the swap.
Users may have traded with BisonFi without even knowing it. Why has this market maker—which relies on a professional team for capital and handles orders through aggregators—been able to capture such a large trading volume? How does its quoting approach differ from the liquidity pools familiar to users, such as Raydium and Orca?
How do professional market makers compete to offer better quotes?
Traditional AMMs let ordinary users participate in market making. Users deposit assets into a liquidity pool to become LPs, traders swap against the pool, and LPs share in the fees.
This mechanism lowers the barrier to providing liquidity, but LPs also face a problem: prices in other markets may have changed while the pool’s quotes remain out of sync. Arbitrageurs trade to eliminate the price gap, changing the mix of assets in the pool. While LPs receive fees, they may also be on the losing side of these trades.
Prop AMMs put quoting and risk management in the hands of professional operators. A study of Prop AMMs previously published by Helius noted that market makers can actively update their pricing curves based on external prices and their own strategies, and concentrate capital near the current price. Lower transaction fees on Solana allow market makers to adjust their on-chain quotes frequently and at low cost, keeping pace with market movements.
Suppose SOL’s market price suddenly rises. If a market maker continues selling at its old, lower price, faster traders can buy up its assets. If the team adjusts its quotes in time, it may reduce these losses. And if it already holds too much SOL, it can adjust its buy and sell prices to make further purchases less attractive.
This explains how professional market makers compete for orders: the team has to manage execution prices, capital allocation, and inventory risk all at once. The price it is willing to offer traders depends on its assessment of the next trade and the risks it will face after that trade is executed.
However, Prop AMMs are not inherently better than all traditional pools. Concentrated-liquidity AMMs also allow LPs to adjust price ranges, and quotes can vary depending on the trading pair, order size, and market conditions. BisonFi’s trading volume shows that it has attracted orders, but that alone does not prove it is cheaper for every swap.
What kinds of orders does BisonFi’s business depend on?
Aggregators let market makers reach users without having to build their own user-facing platform from scratch.
A trader enters an amount in Jupiter or another swap product, and the routing system compares available routes. A market maker that integrates with the system and offers competitive quotes has a chance to handle the order. Users may never know which protocol was called behind the scenes.
BisonFi’s data makes this relationship quite clear. According to a Dune dashboard, a 30-day snapshot for BisonFi shows about $9.09 billion in trading volume, 36.54 million swap events, and 687,500 trading addresses.
Beyond the number of addresses, order concentration is also worth examining. According to the Dune dashboard, the top 20 trading addresses contributed about 48.86% of volume, with the largest address accounting for about 10.85%. The identities and strategies of these addresses have not been confirmed, but this distribution shows that a small number of high-volume addresses have a noticeable impact on BisonFi’s business.
The orders BisonFi handles also include arbitrage trades. Arbitrageurs look for price differences between trading pools, swap the same capital several times in succession, and aim to end up with more assets than they started with.
For example, in an on-chain transaction on October 26, a trader used Jupiter to make swaps across BisonFi, Scorch, and Meteora. They started with about 1.52405 WSOL, a wrapped version of SOL, and ended up with about 1.52509. After deducting the transaction’s network fee, they had gained about 0.001 SOL. That profit came from the price differences along the entire route and belonged to the trader; it does not tell us how much BisonFi earned.
Traders gain more choice, while ordinary LPs face new competition
The expansion of Prop AMMs means different things for different participants.
Traders first gain access to more quotes. If professional teams can reduce market-making losses and pass some of that advantage on through their quotes, users may receive more assets for the same input amount. But the outcome users actually get still depends on the price at execution, fees, and slippage; rankings cannot replace those comparisons.
Ordinary LPs, meanwhile, face competition for orders. In the past, users could participate in market making for a trading pair by depositing tokens. Now professional teams are competing for those same trades. If orders shift to Prop AMMs, the opportunity to earn fees from existing pools may shrink. BisonFi currently has no public retail deposit interface that we can verify, so ordinary users cannot simply replicate the “deposit assets and share in market-making returns” approach.
Aggregators play an increasingly important role in this dynamic. BisonFi gets distribution through aggregators, avoiding the need to attract users directly, but this also ties its business to routing rules, integration requirements, and execution performance. For a market maker that relies heavily on external access points, its trading-volume ranking can rise, but orders can also shift away as competitors’ quotes change.
Competition among Prop AMMs is also intense. Its rival, HumidiFi, held the top spot on the Solana DEX weekly trading-volume leaderboard almost continuously from mid-August 2025 to mid-January 2026. BisonFi overtook it for the first time in January this year and now leads the Solana Prop AMM field.
In the Prop AMM space, specialization creates an information gap. Users can view trade records, but may not know the full pricing strategy, risk exposure, or management arrangements behind them. BisonFi has also not disclosed the identity of its operating team, making it harder for users to assess the risks.