Best DEX on Stellar in 2026: Rankings by Volume and TVL

Stellar DEXs at a glance

Venue	Type	Best for	Key mechanic
Aquarius	Soroban AMM	Most pairs; earning AQUA as an LP	Volatile, stable and concentrated pools; ICE-voted rewards
Stellar DEX + classic pools	Protocol order book and AMM	Limit orders; path payments	Built into the ledger; 0.30% classic pools
Sushi	Concentrated-liquidity AMM	Stablecoin and RWA pairs	Sushi V3 ranges
Soroswap	AMM + aggregator	Routing across Soroban AMMs	Fixed 0.30% pools; adapter router
Phoenix	Soroban AMM	Existing Phoenix positions	Constant-product and stable pools
Comet	Weighted AMM	Blend backstop token	Balancer-style weighted pools
StellarBroker, LumAgg	Aggregators	Best execution on larger trades	Split orders across venues

Stellar DEXs by the numbers (October 2026)

Ordered by Stellar TVL on DefiLlama, 6 October 2026. Volume is DefiLlama's 30-day figure where it tracks one:

Venue	TVL	30-day volume
Aquarius	$39.5M	$98.1M
Stellar DEX (order book)	$17.7M	Not tracked
Sushi	$15.2M	Not tracked
Stellar classic AMM pools	$14.1M	Not tracked
Soroswap	$1.2M	$15K
Phoenix	$47.5K	Not tracked
Comet	Not listed	Not listed

DefiLlama's total for Stellar DEX volume over those 30 days was $98.1M, so Aquarius is effectively all of the volume it measures. Over twelve months Aquarius did $530.8M, with monthly totals swinging from $35.8M in August 2026 to $92.8M in September. The big gap is the protocol order book: StellarExpert's ledger statistics show roughly 320,000 to 1.2 million trades a day on the protocol exchange between 6 September and 5 October, but no tracker we checked publishes a comparable dollar volume, so we do not rank it on volume. Among aggregators, DefiLlama tracked $87K for BIM Aggregator and $41K for LumAgg over 30 days; it does not track StellarBroker.

How to choose

• A one-off swap of a common pair: Aquarius, or a wallet that routes through it. Liquidity is deepest there.
• A large trade or a thin pair: an aggregator, which can split the order across Aquarius, Soroswap, Phoenix, Comet and the protocol DEX.
• Setting a price and waiting: the protocol order book, the only venue on this list with native limit orders.
• Providing liquidity for rewards: Aquarius, where ICE-voted AQUA emissions add to fees; see Aquarius vs Soroswap.
• Providing liquidity on stablecoin or RWA pairs with a range: Sushi or Aquarius's concentrated pools.

Aquarius — the main AMM

Aquarius runs Soroban AMM pools in three types (volatile, stable and concentrated) and adds AQUA rewards that ICE holders vote toward specific markets. It had $39.5M of liquidity and $98.1M of 30-day volume on 6 October 2026, more than every other tracked Stellar DEX combined on both counts.

Pool creators pick a fee: 0.1%, 0.3% or 1% for volatile and concentrated pools, and between 0.01% and 1% for stable pools of up to three assets. Swaps go through a router that can chain up to four pools, with an off-chain path-finding API proposing the route and the contract enforcing the minimum output end to end. A share of fees goes to the protocol, read on-chain from the router. Creating a pool costs 300,000 AQUA.

Two risks are specific. Rewards depend on governance: since June 2026 AQUA emissions only reach markets whose assets are whitelisted, so a pool's reward APY can disappear on a vote. And the concentrated pools are, in Aquarius's own words, a beta surface with contracts under external audit. Our Aquarius AMM explainer covers the pool maths and concentrated pools the range trade-offs.

The Stellar DEX and classic pools — the protocol's own exchange

Stellar has an exchange built into the protocol: a limit-order book in the ledger and, since 2021, classic constant-product pools with a fixed 0.30% fee. DefiLlama counts $17.7M resting on the order book and $14.1M in classic pools as of 6 October 2026. Every path payment in a wallet uses it.

We will not repeat the mechanics here; the Stellar DEX explained covers offers, liabilities, path payments and how a hop chooses between book and pool. Two points matter for ranking. The order book is the only place on Stellar with native limit orders, and Aquarius pays AQUA rewards to market makers who quote on the order books of voted markets. Its weakness is the same as any order book's: thin markets are easy to move, which is exactly how the February YieldBlox exploit started.

Sushi — concentrated liquidity

Sushi launched its V3 concentrated-liquidity AMM on Stellar on 10 February 2026, with the Stellar Development Foundation's backing. DefiLlama showed $15.2M of liquidity on 6 October, the third-largest Stellar trading venue by TVL, concentrated in USDC, USDT0 and Centrifuge's tokenised credit products.

That composition suggests Sushi's Stellar niche is stable and RWA pairs rather than XLM speculation. Upshift chose it as one of the venues for its Stellar vaults. Because DefiLlama does not yet record Sushi's Stellar volume, we cannot say how hard that liquidity works. Concentrated positions earn nothing out of range and amplify impermanent loss.

Soroswap — small pools, wide routing

Soroswap pairs a Uniswap V2-style AMM with a fixed 0.30% fee and an aggregator that splits trades across Soroban AMMs. Its pools held $1.2M on 6 October 2026, down from $9.8M in July 2025, and DefiLlama tracked about $15K of pool volume over the past 30 days.

The aggregator is the more useful part now. Soroswap's documentation lists adapters for Soroswap, Phoenix, Aquarius and Comet, and an issue filed in Soroswap's docs repository in September 2026 notes that the mainnet Phoenix and Aquarius adapters are registered and active, despite older pages calling them testnet-only. Soroswap's core was audited by OtterSec and its aggregator by Runtime Verification. Full comparison: Aquarius vs Soroswap.

Phoenix — an early Soroban DEX, now thin

Phoenix was one of the first Soroban DEXs, live since 2024 with constant-product and stable pools plus staking contracts. Its liquidity peaked at $6.4M in July 2025 on DefiLlama and had fallen to $47.5K by 6 October 2026, less than 1% of its peak, so it is now a minor route rather than a venue.

Aggregators such as Soroswap's and LumAgg still route through it, but at under $50K of liquidity any meaningful trade will move its prices. If you hold an old Phoenix LP position, check it; for new trades, an aggregator will only touch Phoenix when it helps.

Comet — the weighted pool behind Blend's backstop

Comet is a Balancer-style weighted AMM for Soroban, allowing pools such as 80/20 splits. Its best-known pool is the 80:20 BLND:USDC pool whose LP tokens form Blend's backstop. DefiLlama does not list Comet as a DEX, so it has no tracked TVL or volume.

On 25 August 2026 that pool was exploited through a bug in same-asset swaps, a token swapped for itself, for about $717K, and Blend paused its backstop. LumAgg lists Comet as a routing source; Soroswap's aggregator has a Comet adapter in its code, but as of 8 October 2026 only its Soroswap, Phoenix and Aquarius adapters are registered on-chain. For most traders it is an occasional route, not a destination; details in Blend's 2026 incidents.

Aggregators — StellarBroker, LumAgg and others

Aggregators do not hold liquidity; they search the venues above and split an order where that gives a better price. StellarBroker routes across Soroswap, Aquarius, the protocol DEX and classic pools. LumAgg, funded with $90K from SCF #44, covers Soroswap, Aquarius, Phoenix, Sushi V3, Comet and the classic DEX.

This matters because the protocol DEX's own routing does not split a hop between book and pool, and Aquarius's router only sees Aquarius pools. Volumes are still small: DefiLlama tracked $87K for BIM Aggregator and $41K for LumAgg over 30 days, and StellarBroker publishes no volume we could verify. More are coming: SCF #45 funded Lunar Finance to route across Aquarius, Soroswap and StellarBroker, and SwiftEx to route across the SDEX, Aquarius and Soroswap. An aggregator adds one more contract between you and the pool, so check that it is audited.

Checking a venue before you trade

Headline TVL says little about the price you will get on one pair. Before a meaningful trade, look at the depth of the specific pool or order book, compare a quote from more than one venue, and set a slippage limit you can live with.

• Pair depth, not protocol TVL. Aquarius's $39.5M is spread across many pools, and a long-tail pair can hold a tiny fraction of it. The pool page shows its reserves.
• Fee tier. On Aquarius the same pair can have several pools with different fees and depths; the cheapest fee is not always the best price.
• Slippage guard. Aquarius's app offers 0.1%, 0.5% and 1% settings, and its router enforces the minimum output across every hop. Path payments on the protocol DEX use a destination minimum or send maximum for the same purpose.
• The token itself. Anyone can issue a token with a familiar code. Check the issuer before trading; the Stellar DEX explainer covers why thin markets give unreliable prices.

None of this is exotic, but the February 2026 exploit on Blend's YieldBlox pool started with a market where nobody had checked depth. The same check protects an ordinary swap.

How these fit together

Stellar trading has a hub-and-spoke shape: Aquarius holds most AMM liquidity and nearly all tracked volume; the protocol order book and classic pools carry path payments and limit orders; Sushi has built a separate pool of stablecoin and RWA liquidity; the smaller AMMs survive mainly as aggregator routes. Concentration cuts both ways. Deep liquidity in one place means good prices for common pairs, but an incident or a governance change at Aquarius would affect most Stellar swaps.

The takeaway

For most users the best Stellar DEX is Aquarius, reached directly or through an aggregator. Use the order book for limit orders and an aggregator for size. Treat any venue with under a few million dollars of liquidity as a route, not a home for your capital.

Sources: DefiLlama API (protocols, protocol, overview/dexs/Stellar, summary/dexs, overview/aggregators/Stellar), read 6 October 2026; StellarExpert ledger statistics; Aquarius documentation; Soroswap documentation and soroswap/docs issue #47 (17 September 2026); Sushi launch post (10 February 2026); Blend backstop documentation; StellarBroker GitHub; SCF #44 and #45 round recaps. WhaleHub is the publisher of this article.