ClearTrace

DEX Weekly

October 8, 2026  ·  Attribution: Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism

1 · Lead finding

We published a shortfall twice and said we could not name its cause. It was a published fee.

The August 6 and October 1 editions both carried 1inch's realized fill against the Uniswap default route on Ethereum and said the cause could not be attributed. August 6 published WETH/USDC at 28.97 bps behind at $1k over 170 matched half-hours. October 1 published the same cell at 28.70, and USDC/USDT about 10 bps behind at every size from $1k to $1M. Its lead called a shortfall that does not move with trade size a parameter rather than a price, and said we had not established whose. For the stablecoin pair that is now answered, and the answer came from the venue.

Asked for right of reply on October 6, a 1inch community moderator answered within thirty minutes and linked the published per-plan Swap API fee table. The Dev plan takes 10 bps on stablecoin pairs and 30 bps on non-stable pairs out of the destination amount; the paid plans take 7 and 20, 4 and 10, and 2 and 5. Our USDC/USDT measurement matches the Dev row and no other row in that table, and that match is the whole of how we identify the plan. We hold a 1inch API key and cannot read its plan from our side, so an earlier version of this finding that rested on holding no key was wrong and has been withdrawn.

On this week's sample, 1inch's USDC/USDT realized fill is 9.93, 9.99, 9.99 and 9.95 bps behind the default route at $1k, $10k, $100k and $1M, over 375 to 395 matched 30-minute windows per cohort. The disclosed figure is 10.

The October 1 issue went further than that and ruled an output-token fee out, on the grounds that our fill decomposer measured a skim across 5,467 of 1inch's Ethereum rows and read a median of 0.0000 bps. The measurement was right and the conclusion drawn from it was wrong. A fee applied before the quote is returned leaves nothing for a decomposer to find: 1inch's realized fill matches its own quote to 0.00 bps at every size, which is what that 0.0000 says. The fee sits inside the quoted price, which is where both editions located the shortfall, and a destination-amount fee cannot be ruled out by an instrument that compares the fill against the quote carrying it.

WETH/USDC is explained in part. The sample reads 28.69 and 28.47 bps behind at $1k and $10k against a disclosed 30, then 24.64 at $100k and 9.37 at $1M. Some of that 19.32 points of narrowing is the baseline route paying more impact at $1M on a volatile pair, and the venues that can show the effect all show it: of the rated venues carrying a real markup at $1k, LI.FI, which declares a 25 bps fee on the sell token (section 4), narrows by 9.35 points, and a third markup venue is withheld under the publication freeze. A venue already quoting at parity at $1k has nothing to narrow from, so SushiSwap at 1.70 points, ParaSwap at 0.09, and Bebop and OKX drifting 0.39 and 0.59 the other way do not test the effect either way, and we are not citing them as though they did. Outside the rated set, OpenOcean narrows 11.20 points on data 49 days old, and Odos quoted 35.40 bps ahead of the baseline rather than behind it, so it carries no markup to narrow and it wound down in July besides. 1inch's 19.32 is the largest in the markup class by about 8 points over the next, and we are not publishing a split between the baseline and the disclosed fee: that needs route-level data this collector does not request.

Taken at face value the $1M cell inverts: a 30 bps fee against a 9.37 bps net shortfall puts 1inch's route roughly 20 bps ahead of the default route before the fee. That arithmetic assumes the non-stable rate applies unchanged at $1M, which is the thing we cannot check, so it is stated here and not published as a routing result. It does change how section 3's table should be read. That column is what the taker receives, fee included, and the fee inside 1inch's and LI.FI's cells is the one OUR integrator plan pays. It is not a quote a retail user of either venue's own front end is necessarily served, and the ranking is of what our collector was charged.

The miss ran two editions. ParaSwap's and LI.FI's fees were reproduced from our own sample weeks earlier and are in section 4. 1inch's was published the whole time and we did not look for it. The corrections log entry of October 6 carries both halves and the limits on the second, and section 3's 1inch row now names the fee beside the figure.

2 · Who carried the flow

The contracts behind this week's volume, named where we can name them

Attribution volume by the contract that carried the trade, per chain, for the attribution window written on the date shown (the refresh is weekly, usually a Monday, and a missed one is forced on the next sync). A name is printed only when our labeling has one; the rest is in the totals and in the count below each table.

Ethereum, window written 2026-10-05: $5.81B across 3,874 contracts.

12 unnamed contracts over $5M carried $222.4M (3.8% of the chain); 31 contracts carrying $320.9M are withheld under a publication freeze and included in the total.

Base, window written 2026-10-05: $7.60B across 3,492 contracts.

35 unnamed contracts over $5M carried $618.6M (8.1% of the chain); 3 contracts carrying $64.2M are withheld under a publication freeze and included in the total.

Arbitrum, window written 2026-10-05: $879.1M across 724 contracts.

2 unnamed contracts over $5M carried $79.0M (9.0% of the chain); 3 contracts carrying $33.0M are withheld under a publication freeze and included in the total.

Optimism, window written 2026-10-05: $228.4M across 209 contracts.

5 unnamed contracts over $5M carried $113.2M (49.5% of the chain); 3 contracts carrying $4.4M are withheld under a publication freeze and included in the total.

Percentages are of the chain's attribution total in the window; the five rows are the largest named carriers, not the whole.

Entrants that persisted. A contract over $5M this window that was also in the previous attribution window and not in the one before. A contract seen in one window only is churn and is not listed.

No named contract met the rule this week.

Unnamed entrants, by chain: Ethereum: 1 unnamed, $5.2M; Base: 13 unnamed, $207.6M; Arbitrum: 2 unnamed, $79.0M. Their addresses are in the issue manifest and the labeling queue.

Named this week. Labels dated inside the seven days to 2026-10-08, on contracts carrying at least $1M in the current window, that were not already in the seed of the previous ATTRIBUTION window. A label the labeler merely revisited is not new and is not listed.

A further 2 contracts carrying $4.9M received a role label (proxy shape, delegated EOA, bot, bucket) rather than a name; they count as attributed in coverage and are not listed as names.

3 · Execution scoreboard

Realized fill against the Uniswap default, and who reverts

Each venue's realized output against the same trade routed through the Uniswap default, on Ethereum, matched on pair, size cohort and 30-minute window. This is the realized comparison, not the quote gap: a quote gap measures a venue against its own quote and carries no price level.

Median basis points of realized output against the Uniswap default route. Positive means the taker receives more than the default route delivers, negative less. A cell is printed only when rated: at least 30 matched windows spanning at least 7 days and not stale; n/a otherwise. 793 to 3,301 matched windows per printed cell. Sample captured 2026-06-23 to 2026-10-08, 79,074 successful Ethereum captures. Venues under a publication freeze or wound down are not shown.

Router revert rates, Ethereum, 7 days. Every router we measure that we may name, best first. RFQ and intent venues are not routers (the user does not submit the swap), and a venue whose execution model is unclassified is not compared either. 1 router with fewer than 10 reverted user transactions in the window is not listed: that few events is not a rate.

User revert rate is the revert rate over senders whose own transactions to these routers succeeded at least 90% of the time over the window. It is a threshold on each sender's own outcomes, not a classification of who the sender is. Data written 2026-10-07. The highest rate across the full measured population on this chain, named here or not, is 1.70%.

Largest sandwiched trades, 7 days. From Dune's curated sandwich table. Totals count victims of at least $1,000; the unfloored figure is printed beside each so the floor's effect is visible.

The largest victims in the window.

Across the four chains: 5,262 attacks for $52.0M with the floor, 1,731,763 for $819.5M without it. The gap is almost entirely sub-$1,000 rows on Base that the detector books as sandwiches; whether those are one operator or many is not something this table can say. The floor makes the total describe MEV rather than that pattern, and does not characterise it. Dune's detector is curated, not ours, and its false-positive rate is not bounded here. Written 2026-10-07.

4 · Fees, declared and undeclared

What we have reproduced, what DefiLlama reports, and what gas costs

Only a fee we have reproduced from our own quote sample is called a fee here. A flat shortfall we have not reproduced is a parameter we have not attributed, and section 3 labels it that way.

Explicit fees we have reproduced.

Protocol fees, 30 days, as DefiLlama reports them.

DefiLlama's figures and DefiLlama's categories, fetched 2026-10-07; take rate is the share of fees DefiLlama books as protocol revenue. Shown for context; nothing here is reproduced by us. Venues under a publication freeze or wound down are not shown.

Gas as a fraction of a $10,000 trade.

Median of realized gas valued in USD over the trade notional, for successful captures at the $10k cohort with a valued gas price. On the L2s the figure is a lower bound: it covers execution gas and not the L1 data fee.

5 · Market context

Share of volume, inside one category at a time

Seven days to 2026-10-07, with the change in points against the seven days to 2026-09-09. Each table is one category of one chain: the DEX category reads pool-level fills and the Aggregator category reads aggregator-routed fills, and because an aggregator's fills also appear at the pool, the two overlap and are never summed. Total volume; no organic-versus-bot split is published.

Share of DEX-category volume, Arbitrum, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($848.9M)

Share of DEX-category volume, Base, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($7.79B)

Share of DEX-category volume, BNB Chain, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($8.64B)

Share of DEX-category volume, Ethereum, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($6.41B)

Share of DEX-category volume, Solana, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($16.73B)

Share of Aggregator-category volume, Base, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($664.6M)

Share of Aggregator-category volume, Ethereum, 7 days to 2026-10-07 ($3.24B)

Source: dune_global_market, written 2026-10-07, which reads dex.trades for the DEX category and dex_aggregator.trades for the Aggregator category, both collapsed to one notional per transaction. Venue-days under $1M are not in the source. Optimism is not in this source; its attribution appears in section 2. Below the $250.0M floor for tabulating a chain and category, and so not shown: Arbitrum Aggregator ($176.6M); BNB Chain Aggregator ($220.6M). A venue under a publication freeze is counted in Other and not named; removing it from the denominator would misstate every other row. Other absorbs rounding, so each table sums to 100.0.

The dashboard carries the full attribution tables and the methodology notes set out the difference between the quote gap and the realized comparison, and what the user-only revert rate does and does not say.

ClearTrace · Cross-chain DEX attribution. The issue manifest committed beside this issue lists each venue, contract, share and rate figure with its source table, filter and as-of date. It does not carry every number printed here: chain and category totals, contract counts, withheld-row counts and the sample-window counts are in the sections and not the manifest. Sections 2 to 5 are generated from the data; section 1 is written.