Cheaper swaps win.
Tick traversal burns compute. An oracle quote doesn’t. Nomad’s swap ix lands at roughly half the CUs of any other public DEX live today — which is exactly what aggregators route on.
Mainnet · open beta on Solana
Earn the yields prop DEXs keep for themselves.
Nomad is the public oracle DEX on Solana. Deposit once. No range. No rebalancing. The same active market making that captured 60–86% of SOL/USDC volume — finally open to anyone.
The research
Public LPs are losing — quietly.
We pulled every SOL/USDC LP position on Orca, Raydium, and Meteora, valued them in USD against 15-minute Birdeye candles, and compared them to just holding the tokens. The numbers aren’t close.
58.9%
of LPs underperformed simply holding their tokens (last 30 days)
$2.38M
in impermanent loss vs only $269K collected in fees
40.3%
of public LP TVL on SOL/USDC sits idle, out of range
Most positions are idle. Most capital isn’t. The active management on these pools is bots and HFT desks. Retail eats the loss; the pool earns either way.
The market today
Prop DEXs already won. They just stayed closed.
Proprietary AMMs route between 60% and 86% of SOL/USDC volume. They quote as tightly as Binance, on-chain, with swap instructions HumidiFi has optimised down to 143 compute units — roughly a thousandth of what a typical Jupiter swap consumes. Aggregators love them. Retail can’t deposit into them.
Closed depositsNo public LP. No way in.
Closed codeStrategy is private. You can’t verify execution.
Closed flowOrder flow goes where compute is cheapest, not where the LP is.
Active. Transparent. Permissionless. Pick three. That’s Nomad.
Further reading on the rise of prop AMMs: Helius · Solana Foundation
How it works
One mechanism. Three things it fixes.
Oracle pricing. Compute-efficient swaps. Inventory-skewed spreads. The same toolkit prop DEXs use to win flow and minimise loss — packaged into one deposit.
Quote at the CEX, not behind it.
Public DEXs lag CEXs and pay arbitrageurs to close the gap. Nomad reads Pyth Lazer and quotes at the live price — so the gap, and the leak, never opens.
Spreads that move with inventory.
When the book leans long, buys get cheaper. When it leans short, sells do. Inventory drifts back to balance on its own — no range, no rebalancing, no IL spiral.
Aggregator routing
The cheapest swap on Solana, in the open.
Aggregators don’t care about brand. They route to whoever quotes the same price for fewer compute units. Oracle pricing skips tick traversal entirely — and we’re closing the gap to prop DEXs without closing the door on LPs.
DEXPricing pathCompute profile
Nomad FinanceOracle quote~2× leaner than the next public DEX
Public CLMM ATick traversalCompute scales with active range crossings
Public CLMM BTick traversalSame model, similar CU envelope
Public AMM (constant product)xy=k mathCheap, but no concentration
HumidiFi has driven prop-AMM swap costs to ~143 CUs — see Helius’s prop-AMM revolution piece for the full picture.
Why now
Solana finally has the structure for this.
Pyth Lazer is fast enough
Sub-second oracle updates with confidence intervals tight enough to quote against. Five years ago this didn’t exist.
Solana finalises in time
Inclusion latency dropped to a level where fresh oracle reads inside a swap are economically real, not theoretical.
Jupiter routes everything
Order flow consolidated. CU efficiency converts directly into routed volume — no marketing required.
Lifinity left the field
The only other public oracle DEX exited. The opening it left is what we’re built for.
Starting point
xStock pairs first.
Tokenised equities have low volatility, narrow oracle spreads, and almost no real public liquidity yet. Day one, that’s where Nomad LPs earn cleanest. SOL/USDC and the long tail follow.
Why we’re building
Open back what got closed off.
Nomad’s founder was CTO at stabble — once Solana’s 5th-largest DEX, $600M in daily volume at peak. It didn’t die from a hack. It died because aggregators started routing to prop DEXs, and there was no public answer. There is now.