Demystifying Solana Bots: From GitHub Blueprints to On-Chain Fingerprints

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform designed for high throughput and low transaction fees, making it inexpensive to submit transactions at scale and, consequently, increasing exposure to bot spamming and related financial exploitation. Solana bots are typically off-chain software systems that operate in a competitive on-chain execution environment by constructing and submitting transactions, and the bot-related transactions on the decentralized exchanges exceed 250 million dollars in daily trading volume in January 2026. Prior studies on Solana have examined system performance, smart-contract security, and specific on-chain phenomena. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of what Solana bots implement in practice and how these implementations manifest as observable on-chain execution fingerprints. To address this gap, we performed a large-scale empirical study of Solana bots from two complementary views: (i) 586 bot repositories collected from GitHub, and (ii) 200 bot addresses on Solana, with over 44 million on-chain transactions. Our study derives an implementation-grounded taxonomy of Solana bots comprising 15 categories grouped into five domains (e.g., Trading Operations, MEV, and On-chain Analytics), identifies a largely shared five-stage operational pipeline manifested in bot implementations, and uncovers systematic variation in on-chain trading behaviors of Solana bots across diverse trading platforms and assets. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions, and provide recommendations for building and operating bots on the Solana blockchain.