From UI Swaps to DeFi Infrastructure: How Trading Really Happens on Stabull

By Jamie McCormick, Co-CMO, Stabull Labs

The fourth article in the 15 part “Deconstructing DeFi” Series.

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Over time, it has become clear that UI-driven swaps represent only a small fraction of how liquidity on Stabull is actually being used today. To understand the protocol’s recent growth — and where it is heading — it’s important to look beyond what is visible in the interface and toward how modern DeFi actually operates.

How swaps work on the Stabull UI

When a user swaps via the Stabull interface, the mechanics are deliberately straightforward.

Liquidity providers deposit assets into pools. Traders swap one asset for another. A swap fee is charged on each trade. That fee is split between liquidity providers and the protocol, with the LP share retained inside the pool and the protocol share routed to the protocol fee wallet.

From the user’s perspective, the output amount they receive already reflects the fee having been taken. From the LP’s perspective, the pool balance grows incrementally over time as fees accumulate.

This model is transparent, predictable, and intentionally conservative — particularly important when dealing with stablecoins and real-world asset–backed tokens.

The limits of a UI-centric view

If we stopped the analysis there, Stabull would look like many other decentralised exchanges: a place where users arrive, trade, and leave.

But that view increasingly fails to capture where meaningful on-chain volume actually comes from.

Modern DeFi is no longer driven primarily by humans clicking buttons in interfaces. Instead, most volume is generated by systems interacting directly with other systems: aggregators routing orders, automated arbitrage bots correcting prices, solvers executing complex multi-leg transactions, and protocols managing treasuries or rebalancing capital.

These actors do not “use” a UI. They do not care about branding, design, or even which protocol they are touching — only whether liquidity is available at the right price, with reliable execution.

Why Stabull behaves differently

Stabull was designed around oracle-anchored pricing rather than purely curve-based AMMs. That design choice has important consequences once liquidity begins to interact with the broader DeFi ecosystem.

Traditional AMMs derive price entirely from pool balances. When markets move quickly or liquidity becomes imbalanced elsewhere, prices can drift significantly from real-world reference values. That drift is corrected through arbitrage, but often at the cost of impermanent loss for liquidity providers.

By anchoring pricing to external oracles, Stabull pools behave differently. When prices drift on other venues, Stabull often becomes a reference point for correction rather than a source of mispricing itself. That makes its liquidity useful not just for direct swaps, but as part of broader execution paths across DeFi.

In practice, this means Stabull pools are increasingly being touched mid-transaction, rather than serving as the beginning or end of a trade.

Where volume is actually coming from

As liquidity became discoverable, Stabull began to attract programmatic usage:

• Arbitrage systems routing trades through Stabull to realign prices across venues
• Solvers constructing atomic, multi-leg transactions that include a stable or FX leg
• Aggregators selecting Stabull pools when execution quality is competitive
• Protocols and treasury strategies using Stabull as part of rebalancing flows

In many cases, the end user never knows Stabull was involved at all. Yet each time this happens, real swap fees are paid to liquidity providers and the protocol.

This kind of volume is fundamentally different from UI-driven trading. It is repeatable, automated, and largely independent of marketing cycles.

What this means for LPs and the protocol

For liquidity providers, this shift changes the quality of volume rather than just the quantity. Fees increasingly come from consistent, mechanical execution rather than sporadic retail interest. Trades are smaller on average, but they happen more frequently and without incentives.

For the protocol, it means growth no longer depends solely on attracting users to a frontend. Once liquidity is embedded in execution paths, volume compounds naturally as the broader ecosystem grows.

Understanding the distinction

The key distinction is not between “UI trades” and “non-UI trades,” but between visible activity and invisible infrastructure usage.

UI swaps are easy to see and easy to understand. Infrastructure usage is quieter, but ultimately more important. It is how DeFi protocols mature from destinations into building blocks.

Stabull is now clearly entering that second phase.

Understanding this shift is essential to understanding recent volume growth — and it sets the stage for the rest of this series, which explores in detail who is using Stabull liquidity, how they are doing so, and why that usage is accelerating as we move toward 2026.

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.