A tiny cluster of Solana bots unlocked a 3x trading advantage by routing through one proprietary protocol

New research into automated trading on Solana found a nearly threefold difference in positive wrapped SOL outcomes inside one small group of bots. Transactions that invoked HumidiFi, which the paper classifies as a proprietary automated market maker, recorded a positive WSOL balance change about 62.3% of the time. Other transactions in the same 12-address group did so at a 21.01% rate.The comparison covered 244,733 HumidiFi-invoking transactions, including 152,502 with a positive WSOL balance change, and 218,678 other transactions, including 45,949 with a positive change. The rate ratio was about 2.97.The edge appeared in one narrow clusterThe ASE 2026-accepted paper examined 200 addresses associated with two trading-oriented bot services on the Solana network. The researchers selected the top 100 addresses linked to Trojan and the top 100 linked to SolanaMevBot, then collected their transactions from Oct. 1 to Nov. 1, 2025. They grouped 158 addresses into four clusters using measures such as transaction intensity, execution success, fees, and asset breadth, while treating 42 addresses as noise.The paper also studied 586 public bot repositories, but that software sample was built s...