Decentralized Exchanges

On Solana, going to a specific AMM is usually a mistake — Jupiter will split your order across four of them and beat the price. The question worth asking is what happens to a neutral router that starts running its own markets.

Uniswap is where on-chain price discovery happens, and its contracts have an unblemished record. Its front end quietly takes a quarter of a percent that the protocol itself does not charge.

1inch's Fusion mode answered the question every DeFi user eventually asks: why am I paying gas for a transaction that failed? You sign an intent, somebody else pays to execute it, and sandwiching gets much harder.

If you are moving seven figures between stablecoins, the difference between Curve and a standard AMM is thousands of dollars. If you are swapping $200, you will not notice — and you will notice the interface.

Aerodrome does not pay liquidity providers from trading fees. It pays them in emissions, and gives the fees to whoever locked tokens and voted. Understanding that inversion is the whole review.

Raydium's volume chart tells a story about dependency: one upstream partner accounted for a huge share of it, and then that partner launched a competing AMM. What remains is a competent DEX with a smaller role.

Strip away the lottery tickets and the prediction rounds and PancakeSwap is a well-run AMM with the best liquidity on its chain. The problem is that stripping them away is not an option the interface offers.