Glossary of Solana Volume Analysis Terms

The definitions here are operational rather than academic: each one says what the term means when this desk uses it in a reading, and several say what the term does not license you to conclude. Where a term is borrowed from regulated markets, that is stated, because a word that carries a legal meaning elsewhere should not be smuggled into an on-chain description without a note.

Adverse selection: The cost of being on the wrong side of a better-informed trade. A participant quoting both sides of a market pays this cost regularly; a participant trading only with itself never pays it at all. The presence or absence of adverse-selection cost is one of the few economic differences between market making and produced flow that leaves a trace in the data.
Associated token account: The account that actually holds an SPL token balance for a wallet. Its creation is a separate on-chain event, so a cluster of accounts created in a short burst by one payer is an observable pattern, though a payout program creates them the same way.
Base rate: How common a feature is across the whole population before you look at any single case. If most small pairs on a chain show irregular funding structures, then finding one in a particular pair says very little. Ignoring base rates is the most common way a plausible reading becomes a wrong one.
Cadence: The rhythm of trade arrivals in a window. Cadence is described by the distribution of gaps between transactions rather than by their count, and it is the property most directly shaped by whatever software, if any, produced the flow.
Cluster: A set of addresses treated as if one operator controlled them. A cluster is a hypothesis built from observable edges, never a statement about identity or ownership, and every cluster on this site is written with the false positives that could have produced it.
Confidence band: One of the four labels this desk attaches to every inference: high, moderate, low or undecidable. The band is chosen by what the evidence supports, and each band carries required wording so that a reader can tell how firmly a sentence is meant.
Counterparty diversity: How many genuinely separate participants a pair traded with over a window, approximated by distinct signers and then adjusted for clustering. Low diversity with high turnover is a signature; it is also what a small but real community looks like.
Depth response: What happened to pooled liquidity while turnover was rising. Turnover with growing depth means the pair can now absorb larger orders than before. Turnover with flat depth means it cannot, whatever the headline figure says.
Distinct signer count: The number of separate accounts that authorised transactions in a window, as opposed to the number of transactions. It is a raw count, not a participant count, because one operator can hold many keys and one key can be shared.
Falsifier: The observation that would overturn a claim. On this site no inference is publishable without one. If no observation could contradict the claim, the claim is not an analysis, and the honest confidence band for it is undecidable.
Fee payer: The account that pays the transaction fee on Solana, which does not have to be the account whose tokens move. Divergence between fee payer and trader is a useful edge when building clusters and a normal arrangement in several kinds of ordinary tooling.
Funding edge: A link drawn between two addresses because one sent SOL to the other. Funding edges are the backbone of clustering and the source of its worst false positives, because exchange withdrawal accounts and payout programs fund thousands of unrelated addresses.
Inter-arrival gap: The time between one trade and the next in a pair. The distribution of these gaps carries more information than turnover does, because a schedule and a crowd produce very different shapes even when they produce the same total.
Lamport: The smallest unit of SOL. One SOL is 1,000,000,000 lamports, and the base transaction fee is 5,000 lamports per signature. These are protocol facts and are the only fixed numbers used in cost arithmetic on this site.
Net inventory: How much of a token an account holds at the end of a window compared with the start. Near-zero net inventory across many trades is the defining property of round-trip activity and the discriminator against ordinary directional trading.
Price impact: The movement in execution price caused by the size of your own order against available liquidity. It is a real cost paid on both legs of a round trip, which is why persistent round-trip activity is economically visible even when nothing else is.
Produced volume: Turnover generated deliberately, usually to keep a pair visible on screens that rank or filter by activity. This desk treats it as a normal and openly serviced category of market activity, describes its signature, and does not treat the term as an accusation.
Quantisation: The tendency of trade sizes to fall on a small set of values or inside a narrow band. Quantisation can come from software configuration, from interface presets, or from people liking round numbers, and telling those apart is the whole difficulty.
Round trip: A buy and a matching sell that return an account to roughly the inventory it started with. A round trip generates turnover without changing position, which is why it is a signature; arbitrage, hedging and rebalancing produce it too.
Routed leg: One of several swaps an aggregator executes to fill a single user request. Counting legs as separate trades inflates both turnover and trade counts, so deduplicating them is a required step before any cadence or size analysis.
Slot: The unit of Solana block production, targeted at roughly 400 milliseconds. Slots give timing analysis its resolution limit: two events in the same slot have no readable order, so no cadence claim can be finer than a slot.
Spontaneous volume: Turnover produced by participants acting independently rather than under one configuration. It is defined here by contrast rather than by a positive test, because no on-chain field marks a trade as spontaneous.
Turnover: The summed value of trades executed in a window. Turnover is a record of activity and nothing else: it is not a count of participants, not a measure of interest, and not a statement about how much size the pair could absorb.
Turnover-to-depth ratio: Window turnover divided by the pooled liquidity it traded through. The ratio makes pairs of very different sizes comparable and is best read against the same pair over time rather than against a threshold borrowed from elsewhere.
Venue coverage: Which DEX programs a measurement counted. Solana activity spreads across several venues, so a figure that names no venues cannot be checked and a tool that covers one venue describes one venue.
Wash trading: A term with a specific meaning in regulated markets, where it describes trades arranged to create misleading activity without changing beneficial ownership. This desk uses it to name a concept and never applies it to an identifiable party, because intent and ownership are not recorded on chain.
Window: The start and end of the period an analysis covers. A window chosen after seeing the data is the most common silent error in volume analysis, because almost any pair contains some interval that looks unusual.

How these terms are used in a write-up

A finished reading names the window, the venue coverage and the signatures observed, then states an inference with its confidence band and its falsifier. The vocabulary above exists so that sentence can be short. If a page on this site uses a word that is not defined here, that is a defect and the desk would like to hear about it through the contact page.

Three terms carry warnings rather than definitions. Wash trading is a regulated-market term and is never applied here to an identifiable party. Cluster is a hypothesis and never an identity claim. Produced volume names a category of activity and is not a judgement about the people who buy it. The reasoning behind all three is set out in stating confidence honestly.