Concepts

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Swaps

A swap is defined as a single token exchange event between two tokens facilitated by a DEX, aggregator, or protocol. Swaps represent the fundamental building blocks of liquidity flow within the Solana ecosystem. By indexing all swap events across major protocols, Prism ensures complete visibility into market activity and liquidity dynamics.

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Trades

A trade is a broader concept: it refers to a token exchange executed atomically by a single user within a single transaction. In practice, a trade may consist of one or more underlying swaps, as users often route transactions through multiple pools or protocols, whether for optimal pricing, arbitrage, or complex routing strategies. Tracking trades enables in-depth analysis of individual and aggregate trading behavior, supporting user-level market insights. To deliver both accuracy and responsiveness in trade analytics, Prism employs two complementary models:

• Position-based tracking: This model follows each trade from its initial buy to its final sell, capturing the full lifecycle of trading positions and filtering out partial or fragmented trades.
• FIFO-based tracking: Using a first-in, first-out approach, this model matches each sell with the earliest corresponding buy, making it ideal for real-time analytics and short-term performance measurement.

By leveraging both models, Prism provides financial-grade analytics that serve a wide spectrum of analytical and operational use cases.

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Swaps vs. Trades

Swaps tell you what liquidity pools and protocols did, trades tell you what users actually intended.

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Prices

Prism’s price engine is built on top of raw on-chain swap data, producing a unified and reliable price for every token on Solana. Rather than relying on a single source, Prism reconstructs pricing by aggregating the most recent swaps across all major liquidity venues. Our pricing model anchors itself to a set of trusted reference assets (such as SOL and stablecoins), whose valuations are derived from external oracle-grade sources. From these reference points, Prism infers accurate prices for the rest of the ecosystem by propagating through the swap graph. To ensure the resulting price is robust, manipulation-resistant, and actionable, Prism applies a series of filters and structural checks designed to reject unhealthy or distorted market signals.

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Profiles

A profile is a pre-computed, continuously updated summary of an entity’s trading activity across Solana DEX markets. Profiles distill trade data into structured metrics — covering performance, volume, risk, and behavioral patterns — so you can evaluate, filter, and rank entities without processing individual transactions yourself. Profiles are computed for three entity types: wallets, tokens, and positions. All profile metrics are calculated over rolling time windows, allowing you to compare short-term and long-term behavior for the same entity.