📝 Editor’s Note:

Today OurNetwork is checking on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), crypto's bread and butter sector which allows traders and investors to allocate their resources across liquid tokens.

Trading volume, driven partly by increases crypto prices, has picked up in recent weeks. The top fives DEXs, three of which OurNetwork analysts cover below, generated over $64B in the week ending on May 18. That's over 250% higher than 90 days ago, the week ending on Feb. 23.

Below, you'll read coverage of PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Raydium, establshed leaders on their respective home blockchains of BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Solana. Clujso also looked into PumpSwap, pump.fun's new DEX which launched in March and is already generating billions in volume per week.

– ON Editorial Team

PancakeSwap | Uniswap | Raydium | PumpSwap

• The DEX market is extremely volatile. The combined daily trading volume for the top 5 chains is down ~75% from the January 2025 peak. Since the start of the year, the combined daily trading volumes have peaked at ~$45.1B and bottomed at ~$3.4B.

• Token prices follow trading volumes. The token prices for the top DEXs are all down compared to the start of the year. DEXs with the biggest price drops are CoW Protocol & Uniswap, both down ~60%, while PancakeSwap & Fluid are down only ~15%.

• Solana is the top venue for onchain trading. Among the top five chains by DEX trading volume, Solana, BNB Chain, and Ethereum command ~85% market share. Base and Arbitrum One have ~7-8% market share each.

• Over the past week, deposits into PancakeSwap increased by 4%, and trading volume rose by 110%. Fees and revenue also both grew by 81%. PancakeSwap's CAKE token performed well in terms of market capitalization and price, along with the increase in volume and fees.

• The weekly supply change highlights the strength of CAKE's deflationary model. With more tokens being burned than minted, the reduced circulating supply supports the long-term performance of the governance token.

• Followed by BNB Chain itself, PancakeSwap leads the ecosystem in total revenue by a large margin.

• Uniswap remains a dominant force in the DEX ecosystem and has become the blueprint for many other protocols. Over the past two years its TVL has ranged between $3B and $7B. The recent launches of Uniswap v4 and Unichain likely sparked April’s reversal of downtrend in TVL, and today TVL sits at about $5B, half of its all-time high of $10B which came on May 12, 2021.

• Trading fees are Uniswap’s primary revenue driver, charged on every swap according to pool fee tiers — 0.3% is the most common. In Q1 2025, the protocol collected nearly $310M in fees, with Layer 2s Base and Arbitrum accounting for over 35% of that total.

• Uniswap v4 introduces a new “Hooks” feature, which lets teams embed custom logic into pools, swaps, fee structures, and liquidity provider (LP) positions. Early v4 volume is concentrated on BNB Chain, Unichain, and Ethereum, with BNB Chain posting a record $4.2B in volume during the week of May 19, 2025.

• Raydium is the leading DEX by volume on Solana, offering permissionless infrastructure for pool creation and spot trading. The platform also features a newly released perpetuals exchange and token launchpad. Q1 2025 saw a 12.7% increase quarter-over-quarter with daily average volume growing to $3.6B and cumulative Q1 volume surpassing $325B.

• In Q1, a record $76.2M in USDC, up 38% quarter-over-quarter, generated from protocol fees was spent buying back a record 15.4M RAY ,up 17% quarter-over-quarter, or 2.8% of the maximum supply.

• Raydium's new token launchpad, LaunchLab, provides a plug and play solution for teams creating and monetizing a token's launch. Spurred by the success of letsBonk.fun, a token launch pad developed as a partnership between the team beyond the BONK membecoin and Raydium, the exchange developed LaunchLab, a standalone launchpad. LaunchLab's bonding curve has set a daily all-time-high of $120M traded, which was ~38% of Pump.Fun's market share.

• Fees on the category-defining pump.fun are following an S-curve and have been plateauing over the past two months. In the last 90 days, only 0.3M SOL have been generated, compared to the previous 90 days, where 1.1M SOL where generated — this coincided with a broader memecoin slowdown, but also with the launch of other launchpads like Beliefs, Zora, and Clanker.

• There's a total of 135k pump-graduated tokens, with an aggregated market cap of $6B. WOULD, Fartcoin, Pnut and Moodeng are positioned as the top. None of them are under the new PumpSwap model, which launched on Mar. 20 2025. In the new model 50% of trading fees go to creators.

• Pump's dominance has recently been affected by the launch of Beliefs, whose handle is @launchcoin, which leverages Twitter to launch tokens with a single bot mention. Beliefs generated $2.1B in volume and enabled 19k tokens to be launched in the last week.