By Andrew Maury, Founder of Rantum
The decentralized exchange ecosystem is flooded with fake volume. Wash trades, proxy routing, MEV-farm flow — they all look like “adoption” in standard dashboards.
When L2 foundations and grant programs hand out incentives based on volume, they’re rewarding the wrong behavior because there’s no neutral way to attribute a trade back to the actual frontend that originated it. Was it Uniswap? A wallet-native swap? An aggregator? An institutional desk? On-chain, there’s no standard announcement.
That gap is the problem ClearTrace solves.
What We Built
ClearTrace is a live, neutral, third-party execution-intelligence engine built on Dune Analytics’ granular trace and call tables — building on our open-source contributions to Dune, including 67 contracts we submitted for decoding.
It attributes trade origin, benchmarks execution quality, and measures MEV exposure across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism using 172K+ attributed contracts — and serves it through a public dashboard and REST API at cleartracedata.com.
The attribution uses four vectors:
- Call-data suffix trapper — parses static hex suffixes appended to router calldata that standard decoders ignore, catching meta-frontends and wallet-native swap extensions.
- Proxy-router hunt — flags tx_to / pool-address mismatches to reveal custom enterprise frontends and institutional smart wallets.
- Multi-hop origin trace — uses window functions (LAG/LEAD) over per-wallet interaction sequences to map interface hops across chains.
- Fee-recipient vector — clusters anonymous frontends by the basis-point fees they route to on-chain identifiers during execution.
Execution Quality, Measured Neutrally
ClearTrace scores execution by comparing each trade’s realized price against a 1-minute VWAP oracle — the true cost of a trade, not the quoted price an aggregator advertises. Across the four chains covered, the best-performing aggregators land around ~7.5 bps median effective slippage.
It separately detects sandwich attacks (frontrun → victim → backrun) by scanning in-block transaction ordering, reporting both the attack count and total value sandwiched as a distinct MEV-exposure metric.
What It Proves
Foundations, grant programs, and protocol teams now have neutral proof of organic-versus-wash/proxy/bot volume for named recipients — the basis for spending incentives on real adoption. It runs today as a free dashboard and public API, with paid per-chain integrity reports and standing monthly monitoring engagements.
Finding signal in deliberately adversarial data — data that is obfuscated, unlabeled, or actively trying not to be measured — and shipping it as live, defensible infrastructure is what Rantum does.
If you have messy, fragmented data that needs to become a product, let’s build it together.
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