Jamie McCormick
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At the start of this series, we set out to answer a simple question: What is actually driving trading activity on Stabull outside the UI? What we uncovered was not a single partnership, feature, or campaign — but a pattern. Across Base, Ethereum, and Polygon, Stabull liquidity is increasingly being used as part of the execution layer of DeFi itself. Not occasionally. Not experimentally. But repeatedly, programmatically, and with growing confidence.
In the previous article, we broke down who is interacting with Stabull outside the UI — bots, solvers, and aggregators. In this article, we’ll focus on how many of those interactions actually work under the hood.
After reviewing non-UI activity across Stabull pools on Base, Ethereum, and Polygon, one question comes up repeatedly: Who is actually sending these transactions?
When people talk about liquidity provision in DeFi, it’s often framed in abstract terms: “earning fees,” “providing depth,” or “supporting the market.”
One of the most striking findings from our review of non-UI activity on Stabull was not a complex execution path or an obscure protocol interaction. It was a simple relationship between two numbers.
At first glance, Stabull’s role in DeFi seems narrowly defined. The protocol lists stablecoins and real-world-asset–backed tokens. It does not offer direct swaps into volatile cryptocurrencies like ETH. There are no memecoins, no long-tail assets, and no attempt to compete for speculative trading volume.
If solvers explain how sophisticated trades are executed, aggregators explain how that execution reaches users at scale.
If arbitrage bots are the most visible form of programmatic trading, solvers and searchers are the least visible — and often the most important.
When liquidity providers talk about risk, one concern often comes up quickly: bots. They are frequently blamed for extracting value, front-running users, or profiting at the expense of LPs. In some contexts, those criticisms are justified. In others, they misunderstand the role bots actually play in DeFi markets.
Many of the non-UI transactions we traced on Stabull shared one defining characteristic: they were atomic. At first glance, that word can feel abstract or overly technical. In practice, atomic execution is one of the most important — and least visible — building blocks of modern DeFi. It is also the reason why Stabull can be safely used inside complex execution flows without introducing additional risk.
