Market structure
How Solana venues are organised, how a trade is attributed to one of them, and why two dashboards can report two different numbers for the same token.
What this area is about
Market structure is the set of arrangements that determine where a trade can happen, who is on the other side of it, and how the resulting event is recorded. On Solana those arrangements are unusually visible: every venue is a program, every fill is an instruction, and the record is public. That visibility does not make the data self-explanatory. It makes the counting rules matter.
The notes in this area work from the bottom up. A swap leg is the atomic event. A route is a sequence of legs produced by one user action. A venue class is a family of programs that price differently. A volume figure is a sum over some subset of those events, under conventions that the publisher rarely states. Each layer introduces a specific way for two honest observers to disagree.
If you are starting from zero, read the anatomy note first, then the counting note, then the venue survey. If you already know the terrain and want the transaction-level detail, go straight to the swap transaction walkthrough and work outwards.
Related areas
Depth, reserves and migration mechanics live in liquidity and depth. Methods for judging whether a figure describes a broad market or a narrow one live in measurement.
Field notes in this area
- 01 The Anatomy of Solana Trading Volume A volume figure is a sum of swap legs, not a measure of interest. This note takes the number apart: the atomic swap, side counting, route attribution and time windows.
- 02 How DEX Volume Is Counted on Solana Pool-level accounting, indexer disagreement, route double counting, failed transactions and fee handling — the mechanics behind every volume tracker.
- 05 Where Solana Volume Comes From Aggregators, AMMs, order books and launch curves each contribute a different kind of volume, and their shares cannot simply be added together.
- 08 Inside a Solana Swap Transaction Instructions, inner instructions, token accounts, compute units and priority fees — how to read a single swap the way an indexer reads it.