Bots, Solvers, and Aggregators: Who Is Actually Trading Through Stabull?

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:

bots

solvers

aggregators

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: the first layer of execution

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:

price discrepancies

FX misalignments

small arbitrage windows

inventory rebalancing

When a bot routes through a Stabull pool, it is typically because:

the pool’s pricing closely tracks off-chain reference rates

slippage is predictable for the trade size

execution can complete atomically

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:

frequent, small trades

consistent fee generation

minimal directional exposure

From an LP perspective, bot activity is usually the first signal that liquidity is “working.”

Solvers: optimising entire transactions

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:

best execution

gas efficiency

atomic settlement

failure minimisation

A solver may evaluate several possible routes before choosing one. When it selects a Stabull pool, it is making an explicit trade-off:

choosing reliability over raw depth

prioritising price alignment over speculative liquidity

valuing deterministic execution inside an atomic transaction

In the Base transactions we traced, solvers frequently used Stabull pools as:

intermediate conversion steps

stable FX anchors

execution legs that reduced overall failure risk

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: abstracting everything away

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:

queries many pools

evaluates slippage and gas

assembles multi-leg routes

submits atomic transactions

Stabull pools are increasingly being included in these route calculations — not because they always offer the deepest liquidity, but because they:

price stably

fail less often

integrate cleanly into complex paths

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:

continuous

UI-agnostic

driven by external demand

From that point onward, volume is no longer tied to Stabull’s own user acquisition efforts.

How these actors interact

It’s important to note that bots, solvers, and aggregators are not isolated.

In practice:

aggregators rely on solvers

solvers deploy bots

bots test and validate liquidity

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:

bots test the pools

solvers begin including them

aggregators route flow automatically

By the time volume becomes visible on dashboards, much of the groundwork has already been laid.

Why this matters for Stabull

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:

steadier

more durable

more closely tied to real economic activity

Looking ahead

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.