By Jamie McCormick, Co-CMO, Stabull Labs
The 12th article in the 15 part “Deconstructing DeFi” Series.
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Over the past few weeks, the Stabull team has been reviewing non-UI trading activity flowing through our pools across all three chains we support — Base, Ethereum, and Polygon. These behaviours are equally easy to trace on each network, and we see the same or very similar execution patterns repeating across different pools, assets, and chains.
For this series, many of the concrete examples focus on Base not because it is unique, but because the acceleration in transaction volume on Base going into the New Year was what initially triggered the investigation. Once we began tracing those flows, it quickly became clear that the same dynamics are present across the rest of the protocol as well.
What we found across all three networks is that liquidity providers are not just being paid for “being there.”
They are being paid for reliability inside execution paths.
Understanding that distinction is key to understanding why non-UI volume matters, and why it often represents higher-quality yield than traditional retail-driven trading.
In many AMMs, liquidity behaves like inventory sitting on a shelf. It waits for someone to come along and trade against it.
On Stabull, liquidity increasingly behaves like infrastructure.
It is:
This means LPs are not just facilitating discretionary swaps. They are enabling systems to function.
When a bot, aggregator, or solver routes through a Stabull pool, it is doing so because it expects:
That expectation is what LPs are compensated for.
Retail UI swaps tend to be:
Non-UI volume looks very different.
It is:
From an LP perspective, this matters because non-UI volume tends to:
That translates into steady fee accrual rather than bursts of activity followed by long quiet periods.
Based on the transactions we reviewed across Base, Ethereum, and Polygon, LPs are effectively being compensated for:
Every time a transaction chooses a Stabull pool instead of an alternative venue, it is making a trade-off in favour of those properties.
Fees are the reward for providing them.
As described in the previous article, liquidity provision on Stabull resembles a toll booth.
LPs are not:
They are:
Importantly, this toll is paid regardless of whether the end user knows Stabull exists. LPs earn fees whenever liquidity is used, not when attention is captured.
A single large trade can generate more fees than dozens of small ones — but it can also be unpredictable.
What we observed instead was:
This kind of volume is less exciting to look at on a per-transaction basis, but far more valuable over time.
It compounds.
For LPs on Stabull, yield typically comes from two sources:
The key distinction is that swap fees reflect actual usage. Incentives help accelerate adoption, but usage is what sustains yield long-term.
As non-UI volume grows, the balance shifts naturally toward organic fees.
The transactions reviewed represent a snapshot, not an endpoint.
Many execution systems:
That means today’s non-UI volume often precedes larger, more consistent flows later.
From an LP perspective, this is often the most attractive phase: when utilisation is rising, but liquidity depth has not yet caught up.
The important takeaway is not just that LPs are earning fees.
It’s why they are earning them.
Stabull LPs are being paid for:
As Stabull becomes more embedded in execution paths across multiple chains, LPs benefit not from hype, but from repetition.
In the next article, we’ll zoom out again and look at who is actually driving this non-UI activity — breaking down the roles of bots, solvers, and aggregators, and how each one interacts with Stabull in different ways.
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.


