Twelve Questions About Where Your Order Goes
Short answers to the questions that come up once a trader stops asking what slippage is and starts asking who was on the other side of the trade. Each answer stands alone; none of them repeats an argument made elsewhere on the site.
These are the questions that arrive by email and in conversation, phrased the way people actually phrase them. The answers are deliberately compact and deliberately unhedged where the answer is genuinely clear. Where it is not clear, the answer says so rather than manufacturing confidence.
Who actually chooses my route, my wallet or the aggregator?
Usually the aggregator, with the wallet choosing which aggregator. Most wallets embed a quoting service and present its result as the swap screen, so the routing logic belongs to a company you did not directly select. The wallet then decides which endpoint forwards the signed transaction, which is a separate choice with separate consequences. Both decisions are typically defaults, and both can normally be changed in settings that very few people open.
Why do two interfaces quote the same swap differently?
Because they are running different models over different venue sets at slightly different moments, and because they take different margins. One may poll more sources, another may include quoting counterparties, a third may add a platform fee before display. None of the numbers is wrong; they are answers to slightly different questions. The gap between them tells you about the two services, not about which fill you would have received.
Can I tell from a transaction whether a market maker filled me?
Often yes, from the accounts involved. A pool swap touches recognisable pool accounts and moves reserves; a quoted fill typically shows a transfer pattern between your wallet and a counterparty account without a corresponding pool state change. The distinction is usually visible on an explorer once you know what to look for. What you cannot recover is the price the counterparty could have offered, since only the executed figure is recorded.
Does raising the priority fee protect me from anything?
It improves your chances of prompt inclusion, which shortens the window in which conditions can change. That is worth something. It does not make your transaction less visible to whoever already holds it, and it does not outbid a party that is willing to pay more than you for position. Treat a priority fee as a timing tool rather than a defensive one, and budget it per attempt rather than per fill.
What does internalisation mean in this context?
It means a service filling your order against its own inventory or an affiliated counterparty instead of sending it to an open venue. The service captures the spread it would otherwise have paid away. Internalisation is neither hidden by nature nor disclosed by default, and on Solana the settlement is still on chain, so the fill is visible even when the decision behind it is not. The question to ask is whether it is disclosed.
Do limit orders avoid these arrangements?
No, they relocate them. A limit order on Solana is typically held by a program or a keeper that executes when a condition is met, so somebody still decides when and where to fill it. That keeper has its own incentives and its own path to the chain. Limit orders remove the pressure of immediate execution, which is genuinely useful, but they do not remove the intermediary layer or its economics.
Does trading at a quieter hour change anything?
It changes two things in opposite directions. Competition for block space falls, so inclusion is easier and priority fees are typically lower. Liquidity is often thinner at the same time, so the same order size represents a larger share of available depth. Whether the net effect helps depends on which constraint binds for you. Test it on your own pairs rather than assuming that quiet automatically means cheap.
Is latency arbitrage relevant to an ordinary-sized order?
Rarely in a direct sense. Latency competition is a contest between professional participants over fractions of a slot, and an individual trader is not a participant in it. It matters to you indirectly, because the outcome of that contest determines who is positioned to trade around your order. The practical consequence for a normal order is that your own reaction speed is almost never the variable worth optimising.
Does using a fresh wallet for each trade help?
It breaks the link between your trades in the simplest form of history analysis, which has some value if your pattern would otherwise be obvious. It does not affect anything that happens between signature and inclusion, since the path handling your transaction is unchanged. It also adds operational cost and funding traces that often reconstruct the link anyway. Useful in narrow cases, not a general defence.
What is the difference between a tip and a priority fee?
A priority fee is defined by the protocol, paid through the compute unit price mechanism, and applies wherever your transaction goes. A tip is a payment to a specific block-production arrangement operated by a company, made under that company terms rather than the network rules. Both leave your wallet and both compete for inclusion, but only one of them is described in the chain specification. Track them as separate lines.
Can I opt out of order flow arrangements completely?
Partly. You can choose an interface that routes only to public venues, set your own submission endpoint, and avoid designs that poll quoting counterparties. What you cannot escape is that some infrastructure receives your transaction first, and that party has a business model. Opting out is really a choice of which arrangement you prefer, made explicitly instead of by default.
Does any of this matter below a few hundred dollars?
Mostly no, and saying otherwise would be dishonest. At small notional the fixed costs dominate, the differences between arrangements are worth fractions of a cent, and the effort of configuring anything exceeds the benefit. Set a sensible constraint, use a reputable interface, and spend your attention on the trade. The material on this site starts paying for itself when size and repetition make basis points into real amounts.
If a question here has an answer that changed, it will be corrected on this page rather than quietly rewritten elsewhere. Market structure in this area moves through company announcements rather than protocol upgrades, which means an answer can become stale without anything visible happening on chain.
Questions that need more than ninety words are not answered here; they become articles. The two sections on this site, routes and protection, exist because the underlying questions did not compress.