Barter 2025: Year in Review
Content
Introduction
This year was the moment Barter stopped being just a solver – we flipped the DeFi narrative and set out to invent something fundamentally new. Instead of optimizing within existing market structures, we questioned their core assumptions and rethought how execution, liquidity and yield should interact in a mature DeFi system.
Superposition Launch
In March, we published the Superposition whitepaper. In December, we launched Superposition in beta. With this launch, we believe our narrative becomes tangible. Superposition has the potential to rebalance power in the DeFi stack by moving it back to users, allowing them to earn from market activity without surrendering custody or locking capital. It represents the endgame of liquidity provision: self-custodial yield, where value is generated directly from execution and orderflow, not from passive exposure to pools or protocols.
For now, Superposition processed $2M in volume across 3,000+ trades in live market conditions. During beta, we shipped some updates: positions can be created across stablecoin pairs, ETH pairs, BTC pairs, gold-backed token pairs, as well as custom compositions such as ETH/stable mixes. A single position can include an unlimited number of stablecoins, allowing users to maximize execution surface area without fragmenting capital.
Routing Performance
Before Superposition could exist as a product, it had to be earned at the infrastructure level. The foundation of this year was routing performance – over the year, total routed volume increased by $20.5B, reaching $33B in aggregate. The inflection point came in September, which became Barter's largest month on record with $5B in routed volume. This spike was driven by a sharp increase in private liquidity usage. In the same month, BarterDeFi ranked #2 among all routers by private market maker (PMM) volume, routing $2.3B through PMMs. Private market makers offer deeper, more concentrated liquidity and sharper pricing than traditional AMM pools.
Stablecoin pairs dominated this flow. The top three routed pairs by volume were USDC-USDT ($5.49B), USDe-USDT ($1.53B), and DAI-USDC ($1.23B). These pairs sit at the core of DeFi liquidity, and their scale highlights the importance of stable swaps and the inefficiencies that emerge when liquidity is unevenly distributed or exposed to MEV – themes that later informed Barter's research and product direction.
Infrastructure Expansion
This routing growth was supported by deliberate infrastructure expansion. Barter strengthened its solver stack through the Copium solver codebase acquisition, expanded to new intent-based frontends such as 1inch and Velora Delta and integrated a broader set of liquidity sources. Fluid emerged as a critical counterparty, accounting for roughly 50% of routed liquidity, alongside integrations with Fluid DEX Lite, Uniswap v4, Ekubo, Swaap, EulerSwap, and Angstrom. Together, these additions widened the solution space for every swap, setting the execution groundwork for what came next.
Research & Transparency
In 2025 Barter published two research pieces aimed at explaining where real efficiency and inefficiencies in DeFi execution come from. The first analyzed the stable swap market, which now accounts for over 30% of all DEX volume, highlighting persistent issues such as excessive slippage, uneven liquidity distribution and ongoing MEV exposure. The second quantified the rise of private market makers, showing that PMMs facilitated $13.6B in routed volume in September alone. You can check them on our blog.
Alongside research, we revived orderflow.barterswap.xyz, a transparency tool that tracks orderflow from frontend to solver to block builder. Together, these efforts made DeFi and execution more observable, measurable and easier to reason about.
Community & Wrapped
None of this would have been possible without the community that grew alongside the product. This year, we launched and expanded the Barter Discord into a living ecosystem – our community became an active participant in shaping how Barter and Superposition evolve.
To close the year, we've also prepared something special for the community: on-chain Wrapped. It's a way to look back at your year in DeFi through real data: how much you swapped, which tokens and venues you used, and how much capital spent time sitting idle. This Wrapped is built for the community that made all of this possible. We encourage you to explore your results, reflect on how you used DeFi this year and share your Wrapped across social media. Tag us, compare notes, and turn your on-chain year into a story – wrapped.barterswap.xyz
Looking Ahead to 2026
Looking ahead, our main focus for 2026 is scaling Superposition, developing new products based on the Superposition idea and deepening execution.
