Tales from DeFi: What We Found When We Traced Non-UI Trades on Stabull - Brave New Coin

By Jamie McCormick, Co-CMO, Stabull Labs

The fifth article in the 15-part “Deconstructing DeFi” Series.

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By early January, one thing had become increasingly clear to the Stabull team: the growth we were seeing in trading volume could not be explained by user interface activity alone.

There was more happening beneath the surface.

Rather than speculate, we decided to do something simple but time-consuming. Over the course of a few hours, we selected one representative non-UI transaction per pool and traced each of them end-to-end on-chain. We followed every hop, every contract interaction, and every fee payment.

This wasn’t a marketing exercise. It wasn’t meant to produce a polished chart or a headline number. We genuinely wanted to understand who was using the protocol, how they were using it, and why.

What we found was revealing.

What we deliberately did not include

Before getting into the details, it’s worth clarifying what this analysis was not about.

The transactions we examined were not:

• incentive farming
• internal testing
• wash trading (this is a CEX thing, not a DEX thing)
• artificial volume generation

They were ordinary mainnet transactions, executed by external actors, interacting with Stabull alongside other live DeFi infrastructure. In several cases, the parties involved had never spoken to the Stabull team at all.

This made the findings more meaningful, not less.

A consistent pattern across pools

Although each transaction was different in its specifics, a consistent pattern emerged.

Stabull pools were rarely the beginning or end of a trade. Instead, they appeared mid-path, as one step in a broader execution flow that often touched multiple protocols within a single transaction.

In practical terms, this meant:

• a trade might originate in ETH or another crypto asset
• route through USDC or USDT
• pass through a Stabull pool for stable or FX pricing
• and then continue elsewhere before settling

From the perspective of the final user, Stabull was invisible. From the perspective of the chain, it was essential.

Atomic execution, not isolated swaps

Nearly every transaction we traced executed atomically — meaning all steps succeeded together, or the entire transaction reverted.

These were not casual swaps. They were carefully constructed execution paths that combined:

• multiple swaps
• flash liquidity
• fee payments
• and state updates

In several cases, protocols such as Morpho, Curve, or Balancer appeared alongside Stabull within the same transaction. Each protocol was used for what it does best.

Stabull’s role was clear: provide reliable, oracle-anchored execution for stablecoin and RWA legs inside more complex trades.

Who was actually behind the trades?

One of the more interesting discoveries was how impersonal these flows were.

Many of the addresses interacting with Stabull belonged to:

• automated arbitrage systems
• solver contracts
• professional routing infrastructure
• treasury or rebalancing strategies

These actors do not behave like users. They do not browse interfaces or react to announcements. They evaluate liquidity mathematically and route flow accordingly.

The fact that they were already using Stabull — without any direct outreach — suggested that the protocol had crossed an important threshold: discoverability within the DeFi execution layer.

Small pools, meaningful volume

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding was the relationship between TVL and volume.

In at least one case, a pool holding roughly $30–35k in liquidity supported over $1 million in trading volume within a single month. That volume did not arrive in a single spike. It arrived gradually, transaction by transaction, as part of repeated execution flows.

This is a very different dynamic from incentive-driven liquidity mining or speculative trading bursts. It reflects liquidity being used rather than merely parked.

Fees without fanfare

Each of these transactions generated swap fees. Some were small. Many were fractions of a dollar. But they were real, paid in the output currency of the trade, and routed exactly as designed.

For LPs, these fees accumulated quietly inside the pools.

For the protocol, fees flowed consistently to the fee wallet.

No marketing campaign announced them. No leaderboard tracked them. They simply happened — again and again.

Why this matters

Tracing these transactions made one thing clear: Stabull is no longer just a place where users swap assets. It is increasingly a component in how other systems execute trades.

That distinction matters.

Protocols that remain UI-dependent often see volatile, incentive-driven volume. Protocols that become part of execution paths see steadier, compounding usage as the ecosystem around them grows.

The transactions we traced suggest Stabull is moving firmly into the second category.

In the next article, we’ll zoom in further and explain how atomic swaps make this kind of activity possible at all, and why protocols like Stabull can be embedded safely inside complex DeFi execution flows.

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.