By Jamie McCormick, Co-CMO, Stabull Labs
The thirteenth article in the 15 part “Deconstructing DeFi” Series.
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The answer is not a single group, but a set of distinct participants — each interacting with Stabull for different reasons, and each playing a specific role in the DeFi execution stack.
In this article, we break down the three most important actors we observed:
Understanding how each one works helps explain where Stabull’s growing non-UI volume is coming from — and why it tends to be persistent rather than opportunistic.
Bots are often the earliest adopters of new liquidity venues.
They operate continuously, scanning on-chain and off-chain prices and executing trades when predefined conditions are met. These conditions are usually narrow and mechanical:
When a bot routes through a Stabull pool, it is typically because:
Bots do not care about branding, UI, or incentives. They care about whether a transaction completes reliably and profitably.
Because Stabull pools are oracle-anchored, bots often treat them as a price-correcting leg inside a broader execution path. This results in:
From an LP perspective, bot activity is usually the first signal that liquidity is “working.”
Solvers sit one layer above bots.
Rather than executing a single predefined trade, solvers attempt to optimise entire transactions — often across multiple venues — subject to constraints such as:
A solver may evaluate several possible routes before choosing one. When it selects a Stabull pool, it is making an explicit trade-off:
In the Base transactions we traced, solvers frequently used Stabull pools as:
Solvers are particularly important because once a pool is “approved” by a solver, it can be reused across many transactions automatically.
This is how volume compounds quietly.
Aggregators are the most visible of the three groups, even though they often appear furthest from the underlying liquidity.
From an end-user’s perspective, an aggregator is a single interface that “just finds the best route.” Behind the scenes, it:
Stabull pools are increasingly being included in these route calculations — not because they always offer the deepest liquidity, but because they:
A good example of this dynamic is OpenOcean, which completed a custom integration and is now live on Base routing orders through Stabull pools.
Once an aggregator integration is live, flow becomes:
From that point onward, volume is no longer tied to Stabull’s own user acquisition efforts.
It’s important to note that bots, solvers, and aggregators are not isolated.
In practice:
Stabull sits beneath all three, providing a stable execution surface they can rely on.
This layered interaction explains why non-UI volume tends to arrive gradually, then accelerate:
By the time volume becomes visible on dashboards, much of the groundwork has already been laid.
This pattern reinforces an important point:
Stabull’s growth is not driven by short-term campaigns or speculative trading. It is driven by becoming useful infrastructure.
Once pools are embedded in execution logic, they continue to be used regardless of market sentiment, UI traffic, or incentives.
That is why non-UI volume is often:
In the next article, we’ll go one level deeper and explain how atomic swaps actually work end-to-end, and why Stabull’s design makes it a natural fit for these transactions.
About the Author
Jamie McCormick is Co-Chief Marketing Officer at Stabull Finance, where he has been working for over two years on positioning the protocol within the evolving DeFi ecosystem.
He is also the founder of Bitcoin Marketing Team, established in 2014 and recognised as Europe’s oldest specialist crypto marketing agency. Over the past decade, the agency has worked with a wide range of projects across the digital asset and Web3 landscape.
Jamie first became involved in crypto in 2013 and has a long-standing interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Over the last two years, his focus has increasingly shifted toward understanding the mechanics of decentralised finance, particularly how on-chain infrastructure is used in practice rather than in theory.
