Solana's exchanges: the same swap, different pools

First, the pools

Decentralised exchanges have no one placing orders; they use “liquidity pools”: people deposit two tokens in proportion, traders swap against the pool, and depositors earn the fees. The exchanges differ mainly in how their pools are designed:

• Standard pools: funds are spread evenly across all prices. Simple, but capital is used inefficiently.
• Concentrated liquidity: depositors can provide funds only within a chosen price range, so the same money supports a deeper market. Orca’s Whirlpools are this type.
• Dynamic pools (DLMM): prices are cut into bins, each priced and charged separately, with fees adjusting automatically to volatility. This is Meteora’s speciality.

What each one is

• Raydium: launched in 2021 and in its early days plugged its pools into the Serum order book; one of Solana’s oldest exchanges. For a long time tokens that “graduated” from pump.fun went to Raydium, until pump.fun built PumpSwap in 2025. Raydium then launched its own launch platform, LaunchLab, to compete for that business. In December 2022 it lost about $4.4 million when an admin private key was stolen.
• Orca: launched in 2021, known for ease of use and concentrated liquidity pools, with a large share of mainstream pairs such as SOL and stablecoins.
• Meteora: formerly the stablecoin exchange Mercurial, renamed and restructured in 2023, focused on dynamic pools; many new tokens and meme coins debut here. In early 2025 several celebrity tokens launched on Meteora soared and crashed, sparking controversy around its team, and a co-founder subsequently resigned.
• PumpSwap: the exchange pump.fun launched in March 2025. Tokens graduating from pump.fun move straight in, and meme coin traffic quickly pushed it near the top by volume.

Monthly volume

Controversies and risks

• Inflated volume: meme coins and bot wash trading make up a large share; big volume does not mean many real users.
• New-token risk: all of these exchanges let anyone create a pool, so fake tokens and tokens without locked liquidity are common.
• Risk for liquidity providers: when prices swing sharply, depositors in a pool suffer “impermanent loss”.

What to watch

1. Changes in each exchange’s share of volume (the special page shows DEX shares for the last 30 days).
2. Order-book depth on mainstream pairs (SOL, stablecoins), which says more about quality than total volume.

Sources

• Each exchange’s website; volume and locked value from DefiLlama. This page is an educational summary and is not investment advice.