How Proprietary AMMs Are Reshaping Trading on Solana: An Inside Look at Humidify's Market-Making Revolution

The emergence of proprietary automated market makers (prop AMMs) represents one of the most significant developments in Solana's trading infrastructure over the past year. What started as a mysterious category once dubbed "dark AMMs" on Crypto Twitter has rapidly evolved into the dominant force in on-chain trading, processing billions of dollars in volume while fundamentally changing how liquidity is provided on decentralized exchanges.

Top Projects

Lulo

Score: 7,586.13

Bonk

Score: 4,806.12

Sphere

Score: 2,544.42

Moonwalk

Score: 2,026.11

In a revealing conversation on Lightspeed, Kevin from Humidify—the leading prop AMM on Solana—pulled back the curtain on how these sophisticated trading systems operate, their competitive advantages over traditional passive AMMs, and why Solana's unique architecture makes it the ideal home for this next generation of market-making technology.

The Genesis of Prop AMMs on Solana

Prop AMMs emerged from a convergence of traditional high-frequency trading expertise and decentralized finance infrastructure. Kevin, who spent nine years at Jump Trading—one of the most well-known HFT firms in the world—before transitioning into crypto, represents the caliber of talent now building on Solana. His journey took him through Paradigm and Symbolic Capital Partners before ultimately joining forces with the Temporal team to create Humidify.

The project began roughly six to seven months ago when Kevin was trading on Solana using automated strategies but not finding the success he anticipated. A connection with the Temporal team revealed complementary skill sets, and after a weekend meeting to explore potential collaboration, the first MVP of Humidify was born. The speed of their subsequent growth surprised even the founders—from first trade in June to becoming the number one prop AMM by August, and ultimately the top DEX on all of Solana by October.

While Humidify has achieved remarkable success, Kevin was careful to acknowledge the pioneers who came before. The initial cohort of prop AMMs included Solphi and ZeroFi, and even before them, Affinity attempted to pioneer similar technology using Pyth as an oracle for price updates. These early experiments laid the groundwork for the current generation of prop AMMs that have come to dominate Solana trading.

Understanding the Fundamental Difference Between Prop AMMs and Traditional AMMs

Traditional AMMs like Raydium, Meteora, and Orca are built to programmatically allow users to deposit liquidity and generate trading fees from those deposits. The liquidity provider sets their parameters and largely leaves the position to operate passively. Prop AMMs take a fundamentally different approach that more closely resembles how sophisticated trading firms operate in traditional finance.

Rather than accepting customer deposits, prop AMMs like Humidify use proprietary capital and, more importantly, employ sophisticated trading algorithms that update quotes in real time. Where traditional AMMs might update their prices occasionally based on the bonding curve mechanics, Humidify sends multiple Oracle updates every single block to ensure their prices remain competitive and accurate.

"Every single block, actually multiple times a block, we're sending updates to update the prices that we're willing to trade at," Kevin explained. This constant monitoring and adjustment represents a paradigm shift in how liquidity is provided on-chain, bringing the speed and sophistication of traditional finance market-making to decentralized exchanges.

Capital Efficiency: The Competitive Advantage

One of the most striking aspects of prop AMM operations is their extraordinary capital efficiency. While traditional AMMs require substantial locked liquidity to support trading at various price points, prop AMMs concentrate all their capital exactly where it's needed—at the current market price for the next trade.

Kevin illustrated this with a practical example: "If people want to be able to sell all their Solana down to a price of $1, we won't be there. We have no liquidity waiting to buy Solana at $1. However, if you want to sell Solana right now, for as much as if you want to sell one Sol, then we're going to be able to provide you the absolute best price."

This approach means Humidify operates with approximately $8 million in total inventory while processing between $500 million and over $1 billion in daily volume. The efficiency ratio is staggering—every dollar of capital is working constantly rather than sitting idle at prices that may never be reached. Traditional concentrated liquidity AMMs like Uniswap V3 took steps in this direction by allowing liquidity providers to concentrate capital near the current price, but prop AMMs represent the logical extreme of this concept.

The Oracle Update System: Heart of the Price Model

At the core of Humidify's operation is their off-chain Oracle sender—a predictive price model that incorporates data from multiple sources to determine fair value. This system draws on information from major centralized exchanges like Binance, OKX, and Coinbase, encompassing both spot and perpetual markets, as well as decentralized exchange venues for data that nobody else has access to.

The Oracle price represents what Humidify believes is the fair value of any given asset at any moment. Once this price is determined, it must be transmitted to the Solana blockchain as efficiently as possible. The system then quotes a bid below this Oracle price and an offer above it, with the spread between the Oracle price and the actual transaction price representing Humidify's profit on each trade.

"In theory, every trade we do where we're able to land an Oracle update is a profitable one for us," Kevin noted. However, the reality is more nuanced—competitors and sophisticated traders also vie to land their transactions on-chain, sometimes beating Humidify with faster execution or better price predictions. This competition drives continuous improvement in both the price model and the execution infrastructure.

The Technical Arms Race: CU Optimization

One of the most critical technical optimizations for prop AMMs is reducing the compute units (CUs) required for their transactions. Blockworks Research data shows that Humidify has reduced their CU usage from over 300 to under 50 over the past six months—an improvement that has significant implications for their competitive position.

Kevin drew a parallel to traditional finance: "The way I'd contrast it to traditional markets is different entities have their own view on price and there is no right price. But when you want to express your price, you have to have some execution logic, you have to send an order to the exchange. And certain firms just have faster execution logic than others."

In traditional markets, some firms now use FPGAs and ASICs for latency advantages. On Solana, CU efficiency serves a similar purpose—when the scheduler decides which transaction to include first, lower CU transactions have an advantage. Reducing from 300 to 47 CUs means that when competing with another prop AMM's Oracle update, Humidify is more likely to land their transaction first.

The team at Temporal, Humidify's technical partners, treat this as an ongoing challenge. "They kind of see it as a contest and they want to keep bringing this number down as much as possible," Kevin shared. The continuous optimization allows Humidify to quote safely and aggressively, which ultimately benefits end users through tighter spreads.

Dealing with Sophisticated Adversaries

A unique aspect of Humidify's approach is their stance on dealing with sophisticated traders who attempt to profit by arbitraging their quotes. Unlike some competitors who have chosen to blacklist or refuse to trade against informed toxic actors, Humidify has taken a different path.

"We've taken a bold stance on what to do here," Kevin explained. "Up to this point, we've simply tried to improve our system to make sure that we can remain profitable, regardless of who's asking for a quote. I wouldn't say it's a really philosophical stance, it's kind of just because we're competitive and we don't like being beat by anybody."

When Humidify identifies traders who are consistently profitable against them, rather than blocking them, they investigate why. This approach has served as a powerful driver of improvement—each successful adversary reveals a weakness in their system that can be addressed. So far, they've been able to combat every significant threat through system improvements.

The reasoning extends beyond competitiveness. To offer the best service to Solana users with the tightest spreads, a market maker must be able to accommodate any trader. Discriminating between sophisticated toxic flow and retail users seeking the best price isn't black and white, and maintaining open access allows Humidify to serve the arbitrage function between venues while still generating profits.

The Monad Launch: A Case Study in Rapid Deployment

The recent launch of the Monad token on Solana provided a compelling demonstration of prop AMM capabilities. Wormhole had created Project Sunrise and reached out to Humidify on a Friday night, with the actual launch scheduled for Sunday night—just eight hours later.

Kevin jumped on a call with the team, and despite the tight timeline, Humidify decided to attempt providing liquidity for the launch. "We kind of have a very stable setup to just set up new pairs," Kevin explained. Within an hour of Monad beginning trading on its native chain and on Coinbase, Humidify was operational.

The results exceeded expectations. Within a couple of hours, Humidify was offering better prices than any other venue, including centralized exchanges and DEXs on Monad itself. Data suggests that 60-80% of total trading volume on the Mon token flowed through prop AMM venues. For Kevin, this represented a successful demonstration that Solana and Humidify could play a meaningful role in new asset launches.

Price Discovery Moving On-Chain

One of the most significant implications of prop AMM growth is the potential for price discovery to move on-chain. As these sophisticated market makers achieve better pricing than centralized exchanges for certain assets, the traditional flow of information—where CEX prices inform DEX prices—begins to reverse.

"That's the ambition," Kevin confirmed. "If we're not able to quote every asset that CeFi exchanges can support and that other venues can support, we're not really advancing the purpose of crypto to create decentralized markets."

The team is actively working toward what they jokingly call "abstinence trading"—trading without any involvement from centralized exchanges. This requires creating price models that only look at decentralized trading activity, a challenge that traditional HFT firms have already solved in other contexts. For assets like ORE that have no CeFi listings, this capability is already being tested.

"There's always some sort of price discovery and we want Humidify to become that for Solana for as many assets as we can support," Kevin stated. The vision is ambitious: not just matching CeFi pricing, but surpassing it to make Solana the definitive home for trading.

The Volatility Challenge: Learning from the 10-10 Event

High volatility events present particular challenges for prop AMMs. During a recent period of extreme market movement, data showed that some prop AMMs stopped quoting prices entirely. Kevin addressed this directly, expressing frustration with some of the theories circulating on Crypto Twitter.

"The truth is, during that huge amount of volatility, our Oracle sender, our price prediction model fell over," Kevin admitted candidly. "As did a lot of other HFT strategies, as did our CeFi strategies, as did many others that just couldn't handle the unprecedented volatility."

Making matters worse, Kevin was at lunch interviewing a candidate when the situation developed. By the time he could return and restart the system, Humidify had missed approximately an hour of trading—an hour that would have been highly profitable given the market conditions. The team estimates they lost more than $500,000 in potential profit.

This experience highlights an important distinction: the expected behavior during high volatility might be for spreads to widen, but it should not be expected that all prop AMMs stop quoting entirely. That outcome, Kevin characterized bluntly as "a skill issue"—their system wasn't robust enough for the conditions encountered. The incident also opened opportunities for competitors who remained operational during the period.

The Relationship with Aggregators

A significant portion of prop AMM volume flows through aggregators like Jupiter, Titan, and DFlow. These routing systems query multiple liquidity sources and select the best prices for users. The dominance of aggregators has been beneficial for prop AMMs, providing a consistent source of order flow.

"One thing that allowed prop AMMs to be successful initially, which is no longer the case, is that there was really one super dominant aggregator, Jupiter," Kevin explained. "And if you could connect your prop AMM to their flow, that would be enough opportunity to justify the work spent."

The landscape has since evolved into a more competitive environment with DFlow, Titan, and OKX DEX all competing for market share. Initially, prop AMMs had to conform to requirements set by Jupiter, with other aggregators adopting similar standards to access the best liquidity. Kevin expects this dynamic to shift over time, with prop AMMs requesting features that aggregators must support rather than exclusively the reverse.

Humidify maintains no specific bias toward any aggregator, viewing them all as customers alongside the broader Solana user base. The competitive pressure among aggregators benefits everyone—when one ships new features, others must respond. Recent examples include DFlow's jet routing innovation, which checks real-time prices rather than relying on stale quotes, and Jupiter's rapid implementation of similar functionality.

Why Not Build a Consumer-Facing App?

Given Humidify's success, one might wonder why they haven't moved up the stack to build a consumer-facing application. Kevin explained their position clearly: their smart contract logic, including the off-chain Oracle and on-chain settlement, doesn't really require a front end. Routers query their contract for prices, and users access liquidity through aggregators.

"What the routers do is a little bit different than what we do," Kevin noted. "We do have some experience in coming up with routing algorithms, but it's not really an area that we think we're best in the world at."

Beyond technical considerations, building a consumer app requires substantial go-to-market and marketing effort. Kevin praised the Jupiter team specifically as "probably the best in the business at building a community of users, building a product suite and then bringing more and more users to Solana." Humidify sees its role as the technical, trading-focused service provider that enables these consumer-facing platforms to succeed.

Solana's Unique Suitability for Prop AMMs

When asked about expanding to other chains, Kevin provided detailed analysis of why Solana is currently the ideal environment for prop AMMs. Ethereum L1's 12-second block times create a fundamentally different trading environment where pricing accuracy matters more than execution speed—you only need to transact once every 12 seconds.

Solana's architecture is dramatically different. With 400-millisecond slots subdivided into approximately 15-millisecond sub-slots, the chain is "definitely more high frequency in nature." Every 50 milliseconds presents an opportunity for transactions, and the ability to consume data and respond quickly becomes crucial.

"On Ethereum, the market microstructure is a little bit more well understood," Kevin explained. "The supply chain is more well documented. People are more confident in these actors because they've been around for a long time." On Solana, landing transactions efficiently remains more of an art, requiring decisions about whether to use Jito or vanilla TPU, and navigating a rotating leader schedule that spans global infrastructure.

Kevin revealed an industry secret that has become more widely known: using dark fiber for data transmission provides a significant advantage for sophisticated HFT operations. Double Zero's launch has "blown the spot for everybody"—everyone now understands that better networking and bigger pipes are critical for running a performant chain.

While prop AMMs could theoretically exist on other chains (Kevin noted that competitor Tessera has launched on Base), Solana's characteristics and the client teams' focus on supporting this use case make it the clear leader. "Humidify's home will always be on Solana," Kevin stated definitively.

The Temporal Partnership and Zomi

Humidify's technical infrastructure relies heavily on their partnership with the Temporal team. The Humidify team itself is small—Kevin and one other close collaborator, plus some Temporal engineers working as a joint venture focused exclusively on Humidify.

They use Temporal's Zomi product for landing transactions because it's the best available tool for their needs. However, Kevin noted he doesn't have detailed knowledge of Temporal's broader plans, including their work with Harmonic. "I kind of get the same news as everybody else," he admitted, joking that he'd be open to an advisor role if the Temporal team wanted to discuss it.

There are no current plans for vertical integration with Harmonic, though the team watches the space carefully. Humidify's focus extends to studying Jito—the primary method for landing transactions—and proposing improvements to make the overall microstructure more efficient. These contributions benefit the broader ecosystem while maintaining Humidify's competitive position.

The WET Token Launch via Jupiter DTF

Humidify announced their WET token launch through Jupiter's new Decentralized Token Formation (DTF) platform. Kevin outlined several reasons for choosing this approach over alternatives like the recent ICO on Coinbase used by Monad.

First, there's alignment in principles around transparency. Despite Humidify's generally secretive nature as proprietary traders, the reputation of the team members is "extremely important." DTF provides transparency about token dissemination, wallet locations, and planned allocations. This matches Humidify's values and provides confidence to potential token holders.

Second, Jupiter's position as a leading aggregator means they understand the market structure and the right path forward. The DTF user base aligns with Humidify's target audience—Solana-focused traders who understand and benefit from prop AMM technology.

Finally, being the first project on DTF represents an opportunity to kick things off successfully for the platform. The launch was scheduled for the day following the interview, with the TGE expected around December 5th.

Looking Forward: Competition and Infrastructure

When asked about exciting developments in Solana's infrastructure, Kevin emphasized the importance of continued competition. The game being played currently focuses on improving utility for existing Solana users, with the long-term goal of helping users trade on decentralized platforms.

Kevin mentioned following various technical developments like MCP and other companies working on infrastructure improvements. Rather than endorsing specific designs, he appreciates the discourse and competition that pushes everyone to improve. His primary wish for Solana is "a continued emphasis on doing a few things well or maybe just one thing well and becoming the best at it rather than trying to do everything in a mediocre manner."

The Monad launch demonstrated what's possible when multiple parties push in the same direction. Success requires bringing assets on-chain (Wormhole's role), having exchanges list and trade those assets, venues that don't rely on external protocols or CeFi listings, and users who want to participate. Each component is essential, and attempting to half-implement any element undermines the entire system.

The Vision for Solana as Internet Capital Markets

Kevin's closing remarks painted a picture of Solana's potential as the home of global trading. The goal isn't just to match centralized exchange capabilities but to exceed them—supporting all assets people want to trade, providing the best prices regardless of order size, and doing so from day one of any token launch.

The user experience matters: someone shouldn't have to participate in a presale on one platform, bridge assets to Solana for trading, and then bridge back for staking. The entire lifecycle should be seamless on Solana. While Humidify focuses specifically on trading execution, they see themselves as one piece of a broader ecosystem that must work in concert.

"Solana wants to be internet capital markets," Kevin stated. "In order to do that, you have to be able to support the assets that people want." This means supporting them on day one, minute one, with the deepest liquidity and best trading spreads. Prop AMMs like Humidify represent a crucial piece of this vision—the sophisticated market-making infrastructure that transforms Solana from a blockchain with trading capabilities into a true capital markets platform.

The Broader Implications for DeFi

The rise of prop AMMs on Solana represents more than just an evolution in trading infrastructure—it signals a maturation of decentralized finance toward the efficiency standards of traditional markets. The techniques and technologies being deployed by teams like Humidify draw directly from the playbooks of the world's most sophisticated trading firms.

This sophistication brings benefits to everyday users. Tighter spreads mean less money lost to trading costs. Better price discovery means assets trade closer to their fair value. Capital efficiency means more liquidity is available where it's actually needed rather than sitting idle at extreme price points.

At the same time, this evolution raises questions about decentralization and accessibility. Competing in this environment requires significant technical expertise, substantial capital, and access to infrastructure like dark fiber networks. The barriers to entry are higher than for passive AMM liquidity provision.

However, Kevin's perspective offers reassurance: Humidify doesn't want to be the only market maker, and they believe the ecosystem requires multiple participants and competition to function properly. Their success has come not from regulatory moats or exclusive access but from building better technology and trading systems. Anyone with the skills and resources can potentially compete.

The Intersection of CeFi Expertise and DeFi Infrastructure

Kevin's background at Jump Trading provides insight into the talent flowing into crypto infrastructure. Traditional finance firms have spent decades optimizing market-making operations, developing sophisticated price models, and building high-performance execution systems. As that expertise migrates to crypto, the gap between centralized and decentralized trading narrows.

This migration isn't merely about reproducing CeFi capabilities on-chain. The constraints and opportunities of blockchain infrastructure create new challenges and possibilities. Solana's 400-millisecond slots with sub-slot granularity create a different optimization landscape than traditional exchange matching engines. The transparency of on-chain transactions enables new forms of competition and analysis.

For Solana specifically, attracting this caliber of talent and supporting their infrastructure needs positions the chain for continued dominance in trading activity. The client teams' focus on features that benefit trading—lower latency, better scheduling, improved networking—reflects understanding that this use case drives meaningful activity and value to the ecosystem.

Conclusion: A New Era for On-Chain Trading

The conversation with Kevin from Humidify reveals a sophisticated and rapidly evolving market structure on Solana. What began as mysterious "dark AMMs" has become the dominant form of on-chain trading, processing the majority of volume for many popular assets.

The success of prop AMMs demonstrates Solana's ability to support capital markets applications that rival or exceed centralized alternatives. Through continuous optimization of price models, execution infrastructure, and capital efficiency, teams like Humidify are proving that decentralized trading doesn't require sacrificing quality.

Looking ahead, the vision is ambitious: Solana as the home of trading for any asset, with prop AMMs providing the sophisticated market-making layer that enables this future. The competition among prop AMMs, aggregators, and infrastructure providers ensures continued innovation, while the inflow of traditional finance expertise accelerates the ecosystem's maturation.

For users, this evolution means better prices, deeper liquidity, and access to trading opportunities that previously required centralized exchange accounts. For Solana, it means a compelling differentiation from other blockchain platforms—not just fast and cheap, but genuinely superior for its core use case. The prop AMM revolution is still in its early stages, but its impact on on-chain trading is already transformative.

Facts + Figures

• Humidify operates with approximately $8 million in total inventory while processing between $500 million and over $1 billion in daily trading volume, demonstrating extraordinary capital efficiency

• Kevin spent nine years at Jump Trading, one of the world's most prominent high-frequency trading firms, before transitioning to crypto and eventually co-founding Humidify

• Humidify went from first trade in June 2024 to becoming the number one prop AMM by August, and the top DEX on all of Solana by October

• The team has reduced their compute unit (CU) usage from over 300 to under 50 over six months, providing significant competitive advantage in transaction landing

• During the high volatility "10-10 event," Humidify's systems went down for approximately one hour, resulting in an estimated loss of over $500,000 in potential profit

• During the Monad token launch, 60-80% of total trading volume flowed through prop AMM venues according to analyst data

• Humidify was able to set up and begin quoting the Monad token within one hour of its launch, offering better prices than centralized exchanges within a few hours

• Solana's architecture provides approximately 15-millisecond sub-slots within 400-millisecond slots, enabling high-frequency trading activity

• Ethereum L1 has 12-second block times, making its trading environment fundamentally different from Solana's

• Competitor Tessera has launched a prop AMM on Base, demonstrating the technology can work on other chains

• The Humidify core team consists of Kevin, one other close collaborator, and engineers from the Temporal team working as a joint venture

• Humidify uses Temporal's Zomi product for transaction landing, which they describe as the best available tool for their needs

• The WET token launch is being conducted through Jupiter's new Decentralized Token Formation (DTF) platform, with Humidify being the first project to launch on the platform

• Humidify quotes approximately 15 different tokens in addition to their primary SOL-USDC pair

• Dark fiber infrastructure has become an important advantage for sophisticated prop AMM operations, with Double Zero bringing more attention to networking requirements

Questions Answered

What is a prop AMM and how does it differ from traditional AMMs?

A prop AMM (proprietary automated market maker) uses proprietary capital and sophisticated trading algorithms to provide liquidity, rather than accepting customer deposits like traditional AMMs. While traditional AMMs like Raydium or Orca programmatically allow users to deposit liquidity and earn trading fees passively, prop AMMs actively manage quotes with multiple updates per block. The key innovation is that prop AMMs concentrate all their capital for the immediate next trade rather than spreading liquidity across a wide price range, making them dramatically more capital efficient. They essentially bring the sophistication of traditional finance market-making to decentralized exchanges.

How do prop AMMs achieve such high capital efficiency?

Prop AMMs achieve extraordinary capital efficiency by placing all liquidity exactly where it's needed—at the current market price for the next trade only. Unlike traditional AMMs that must maintain liquidity at various price points (including prices that may never be reached), prop AMMs have no resting liquidity that sits unused. Humidify operates with roughly $8 million in inventory while processing $500 million to over $1 billion in daily volume. This means every dollar of capital is constantly working rather than sitting idle waiting for extreme price scenarios.

How does Humidify determine and update prices?

Humidify uses an off-chain Oracle sender that runs a predictive price model, incorporating data from major centralized exchanges like Binance, OKX, and Coinbase (both spot and perpetual markets), as well as decentralized exchange data. This model determines what they believe is the fair value of any asset at any moment. Multiple times per block, they send Oracle updates to the Solana blockchain with their current price view. The system then quotes a bid below this Oracle price and an offer above it, with the spread between the Oracle price and actual transaction price representing their profit.

Why has Solana become the dominant chain for prop AMMs?

Solana's architecture is uniquely suited for prop AMM operations due to its high-frequency nature. With 400-millisecond slots subdivided into approximately 15-millisecond sub-slots, transactions can occur every 50 milliseconds—far faster than Ethereum's 12-second blocks. This requires and rewards the ability to consume data and respond quickly. Additionally, Solana's client teams have focused on features that benefit trading, including lower latency, better scheduling, and improved networking. The rotating leader schedule and global infrastructure requirements create optimization challenges that sophisticated teams can turn into advantages.

How does Humidify handle sophisticated traders who try to arbitrage their quotes?

Unlike some competitors who blacklist or refuse to trade against informed traders, Humidify has chosen to improve their systems to remain profitable against any counterparty. When they identify traders consistently profiting against them, they investigate why rather than simply blocking them. This competitive approach has driven continuous improvement in their systems. Kevin noted this isn't purely philosophical—they're competitive and "don't like being beat by anybody." This strategy also allows them to serve the arbitrage function between venues while maintaining profitability and offering the tightest spreads to all users.

What happened during the high volatility event when prop AMMs stopped quoting?

During a period of extreme volatility, Humidify's Oracle sender and price prediction model "fell over"—the system wasn't robust enough to handle the unprecedented conditions. Kevin was at lunch interviewing a candidate when the situation developed, and by the time he could return and restart the system, approximately an hour of trading had been missed. They estimate this cost over $500,000 in potential profit. Kevin characterized this candidly as "a skill issue" rather than intentional behavior, noting that the expected response to high volatility might be wider spreads, but systems shouldn't stop quoting entirely.

Why did Humidify choose Jupiter's DTF platform for their token launch?

Humidify chose Jupiter's Decentralized Token Formation platform for several reasons. First, there's strong alignment on principles of transparency—DTF provides clear information about token dissemination, wallet locations, and planned allocations, which matches Humidify's values despite their generally secretive nature. Second, Jupiter's position as a leading aggregator means they understand the market structure and optimal path forward. Third, the DTF user base represents Humidify's target audience of Solana-focused traders. Finally, being the first project on DTF presented an opportunity to help launch the platform successfully.

Can price discovery actually move on-chain away from centralized exchanges?

Yes, and this is an explicit goal for Humidify. During the Monad token launch, they were offering better prices than any centralized exchange within hours. The team is working on "abstinence trading"—creating price models that rely only on decentralized trading activity. For assets like ORE that have no CeFi listings, this is already being tested. The vision is that if Solana wants to be "internet capital markets," it needs to support assets with the deepest liquidity and best spreads from day one, regardless of centralized exchange listings.

What is the relationship between Humidify and aggregators like Jupiter?

Aggregators like Jupiter, DFlow, and Titan query multiple liquidity sources including Humidify's smart contract to find the best prices for users. Initially, prop AMMs had to conform to requirements set by Jupiter as the dominant aggregator. The landscape has since become more competitive, which benefits the ecosystem through continued innovation. Humidify maintains no preference among aggregators, viewing them as customers. Kevin expects the dynamic to evolve, with prop AMMs eventually requesting features that aggregators must support, rather than exclusively the reverse.

Why doesn't Humidify build a consumer-facing trading application?

Humidify sees their role as the technical, trading-focused service provider rather than the consumer-facing platform. Their infrastructure—the off-chain Oracle and on-chain smart contract—doesn't require a front end. Building consumer apps requires substantial go-to-market and marketing effort that teams like Jupiter excel at. Kevin praised Jupiter as "probably the best in the business at building a community of users." Humidify believes routing and aggregation isn't where they're "best in the world," so they focus on what they do best: providing the tightest spreads and best trading outcomes through their specialized infrastructure.