This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . Over the past few months, people involved in Solana DeFi have been asking questions about SolFi, a DEX that sprang up in November and almost immediately captured over 20% market share on swaps between stablecoins and SOL. SolFi was able to quote better prices than competitors, but at least one business partner I spoke to didn’t know who was behind the new exchange before today. In general, few seemed to be in the loop as to how SolFi was achieving such good prices. Today, Ellipsis Labs — a DeFi shop currently building an Ethereum layer-2 that uses Solana’s software called Atlas — publicly claimed credit for developing SolFi. In an announcement on X, Ellipsis Labs co-founder Eugene Chen said the DEX “came from our deep understanding of the market structure on Solana.” Prior to building Atlas, Ellipsis created an orderbook Solana DEX called Phoenix. SolFi has no frontend, but Chen added that the DEX had partnered with Jupiter Exchange to bring the product to retail traders. SolFi is one of 51 DEXs that are part of Jupiter’s swap aggregator, but it currently makes up for 25% of Jupiter volume — far more than any other DEX — according to a Dune dashboard . The Solana rumor mill tended to reason that SolFi’s creators had to be someone with roots in the network, and Ellipsis certainly seems to have the technical chops to fit the bill. “The Ellipsis Labs team are some of the most talented SVM developers in the ecosystem. It should be no surprise, given what they’ve built with Phoenix and Atlas, that they’ve also been able to find success with SolFi,” Switchboard co-founder Chris Hermida said. SolFi isn’t the only anonymous Solana DEX. Orbic and ZeroFi are other newer Solana DEXs that have commanded significant trading volumes without publicly disclosing who their developers are. Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters: Blockworks Daily : Unpacking crypto and the markets. Empire : Crypto news and analysis to start your day. Forward Guidance : The intersection of crypto, macro and policy. 0xResearch : Alpha directly in your inbox. Lightspeed : All things Solana. The Drop : Apps, games, memes and more. Supply Shock : Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.
