Aquarius vs Soroswap: Which Stellar DEX Should You Use?

Aquarius vs Soroswap at a glance

	Aquarius	Soroswap
What it is	Soroban AMM plus an incentive layer	Soroban AMM plus an aggregator
Pool types	Volatile, stable (up to 3 assets), concentrated	Constant product only
Swap fee	0.1/0.3/1% volatile and concentrated; 0.01–1% stable	0.30% fixed
LP rewards	AQUA emissions via ICE votes, up to 2.5× boost, third-party incentives	Swap fees
TVL (6 Oct 2026)	$39.5M	$1.2M
30-day volume	$98.1M	About $15K
Routing	Own pools, up to 4 hops	Splits across Soroswap, Aquarius and Phoenix
Audits	Concentrated pools under external audit (per docs)	OtterSec (core), Runtime Verification (aggregator)

The numbers (October 2026)

DefiLlama's figures for 6 October 2026:

Metric	Aquarius	Soroswap
TVL	$39.5M	$1.2M
Peak TVL	$52.9M (11 May 2026)	$9.8M (18 Jul 2025)
30-day volume	$98.1M	$15.2K
12-month volume	$530.8M	$18.5M
All-time volume	$794.3M	$36.0M
30-day fees	$163.9K	About $46

Soroswap's tracked pool volume has been close to zero since mid-2026, against $8.4M in July 2025. Its aggregator sends much of its flow into other protocols' pools, where the volume is counted for them. Aquarius had its busiest months in June 2026 ($87.5M) and September 2026 ($92.8M).

How to choose

• You want to earn on liquidity: Aquarius. Rewards there can exceed the fees; Soroswap pays only the fee.
• You trade stablecoins or pegged pairs: Aquarius's stable pools, with fees as low as 0.01% and a curve built for 1:1 assets.
• You want the best price on a larger swap: an aggregator, Soroswap's or another, which may route through both.
• You want the simplest possible pool: Soroswap's non-upgradeable constant-product contracts have fewer moving parts, at the cost of thin liquidity.

Aquarius — the liquidity layer

Aquarius runs Soroban AMM pools in three types and pays AQUA emissions to pools that ICE holders vote for. It launched its AMMs in July 2024 and is now Stellar's main venue, with $39.5M of liquidity and almost all the DEX volume DefiLlama tracks on Stellar.

Pool creators choose a fee tier: 0.1%, 0.3% or 1% for volatile constant-product pools and concentrated pools, 0.01% to 1% for stable pools of up to three assets. Up to three concentrated pools, one per tier, can exist for a pair. Trading fees go mainly to LPs; a configurable share goes to the protocol, and on high-volume markets part of the fees funds voting incentives. Creating a pool costs 300,000 AQUA. Pool maths: the Aquarius AMM explained.

Soroswap — the simple AMM that became a router

Soroswap is a constant-product AMM in non-upgradeable Soroban contracts, with a single fixed 0.30% fee, plus an aggregator contract that splits trades across other AMMs through adapters. Its own pools held $1.2M on 6 October 2026, about an eighth of their July 2025 peak, so most of its traffic now ends up in other protocols' pools.

The fee is hard-coded: Soroswap's docs say a 0.05% protocol share could be switched on later, leaving 0.25% to LPs, but the total cannot change. The appeal is predictability, with no governance deciding your reward rate. The problem is depth: with $1.2M across all pools, a sizeable trade moves the price far more than the fee does.

Fees: what you actually pay

Soroswap charges 0.30% on every swap. Aquarius ranges from 0.01% on some stable pools to 1% on volatile pools that chose the top tier. For any pair, the cheapest route is whichever pool combines a low fee with enough depth that slippage stays small.

For a large stablecoin swap, a 0.01%–0.05% Aquarius stable pool will usually beat a 0.30% constant-product pool by a wide margin, because the stable curve also keeps slippage low near 1:1. For a volatile long-tail token, the deciding factor is usually which pool has liquidity at all. Both run on Stellar, so network fees are tiny either way.

To put the fee tiers in dollars: on a $10,000 swap, 0.30% is $30, 0.1% is $10 and 0.01% is $1. Slippage on a shallow pool can easily exceed all of those, which is why depth decides most comparisons.

Rewards: AQUA emissions and ICE vs swap fees

Aquarius pools in its reward zone receive continuous AQUA emissions on top of fees; ICE holders can boost their share up to 2.5×, and third parties can add their own incentives. Soroswap's documentation describes only the 0.30% swap fee as LP income.

The Aquarius numbers, from its docs: 7M AQUA a day are allocated to SDEX and AMM rewards; a market enters the reward zone at 0.5% of votes; a single market is capped at 10% of the daily allocation; and since June 2026 only markets whose assets are all whitelisted earn AQUA. The boost follows Curve's working-balance model and is recalculated hourly. The catch is dependence on votes: a pool's reward APY can fall sharply when votes or whitelisting change. How voting and bribes work: ICE voting and bribes on Aquarius. WhaleHub, the publisher of this article, aggregates ICE for stakers who would rather not manage votes themselves.

Worked example: what the numbers mean for an LP

On fees alone, a liquidity provider earns their share of the pool's swap fees, which depends on volume relative to depth. On Aquarius, AQUA rewards and the ICE boost come on top. The docs' own example shows how much the boost can move the result.

Fee income is simple arithmetic. A pool that trades $1M a day at 0.30% generates $3,000 of fees a day; an LP with 1% of the pool receives $30 of that, before any protocol share. Thin pools with little volume earn little, which is the position most Soroswap pools are in today.

Aquarius's documentation gives a boost example: an LP holding 5M ICE, about 0.01% of supply, who supplies 0.01% of a pool's liquidity gets the full 2.5× boost, turning a 10% base rewards APY into 25%. Doubling the pool share to 0.02% with the same ICE drops the boost to 1.75×. In other words, the boost rewards ICE relative to position size, so large LPs without much ICE get close to the base rate. Rewards are paid in AQUA, so their dollar value also moves with the AQUA price. For the wider picture, see what is the AQUA token.

Routing: router vs aggregator

Aquarius's router chains swaps through up to four Aquarius pools, using a path-finding API to propose the route. Soroswap's aggregator goes further: it can split one trade across Soroswap, Aquarius and Phoenix pools in a single transaction (the three adapters registered on-chain as of 8 October 2026; a Comet adapter exists in its code but is not registered), with an off-chain optimiser choosing the split.

Soroswap's docs list adapters for those four protocols, and an issue filed in its docs repository on 17 September 2026 notes that the mainnet Aquarius and Phoenix adapters are registered and unpaused, although older pages still call them testnet-only. The trade-off is one more contract in the path, and the docs warn that underlying protocols or tokens can upgrade their code. The aggregator was audited by Runtime Verification in August 2024. Other routers, including StellarBroker and LumAgg, also cover both venues; see the best DEX on Stellar.

Risks of each

• Aquarius: governance risk. Reward rates depend on votes and on the asset whitelist, both of which change.
• Aquarius: newer pool types. Its docs call the concentrated-liquidity surface beta, with contracts under external audit. Concentrated positions earn nothing out of range and amplify impermanent loss.
• Aquarius: stable pools assume a peg. Its docs warn that putting volatile assets in a stable pool can drain value if prices diverge.
• Soroswap: thin liquidity. $1.2M of TVL means high slippage on direct trades, and LPs earn little in fees.
• Soroswap: dependence on others. Routed trades inherit the risk of every pool and adapter they touch.
• Both: token risk. Anyone can create a pool for any token, so check the issuer before trading a pair.

How they fit together

The two are less rivals than layers. Aquarius is where Stellar's AMM liquidity sits, because its rewards pay LPs to be there. Soroswap began as a competing AMM but its pools have shrunk, and its aggregator now treats Aquarius as a source. A typical routed swap might touch both.

That also means the choice is mostly about liquidity provision, not trading. A trader can reach Aquarius pools through Aquarius's own app, through Soroswap's aggregator or through a wallet's swap screen and pay the same pool fee. A liquidity provider has to pick a pool, and there the difference is stark: one venue pays AQUA rewards and holds most of the depth, the other pays only its fixed fee on very little volume.

The takeaway

To provide liquidity, use Aquarius and understand its voting and whitelist rules first. To swap, use whichever interface you prefer, but check that it routes through deep pools; an aggregator such as Soroswap's helps on larger trades. Do not treat Soroswap's small pools as a place to park meaningful capital until their liquidity recovers.

Sources: DefiLlama API (protocol, summary/dexs and overview/fees endpoints for aquarius-stellar and soroswap), read 6 October 2026; Aquarius documentation (AMM overview, integration guide, concentrated liquidity, voting, ICE boosts, pool incentives); Soroswap documentation (fees, how Soroswap works, aggregator, adapters, audits) and soroswap/docs issue #47. WhaleHub is the publisher of this article.