Trending pools, measured against liquidity thresholds

2026-11-04 UTC · Farbeam research

Snapshot: pools read from 2026-11-04T19:41:58Z to 19:43:17Z. Token reports read from 19:47:49Z to 19:52:26Z, with about 6 seconds between calls. This note takes the pools that GeckoTerminal ranks as trending on each chain, and measures their liquidity against the same thresholds that the Farbeam token report uses.

The starting idea was that trending pools are thin. The measurement supports that only in part. Most of the sample has more than $100,000 of liquidity, while a large minority does not, and one chain stands apart. This note names no tokens, and it recommends none. A place on a trending list is not a signal.

#The call

for c in ethereum base bnb arbitrum optimism polygon solana; do
  curl -s "https://farbeamlabs.com/api/v1/markets/pools?chain=$c" > "pools_$c.json"
done

const chains = ["ethereum", "base", "bnb", "arbitrum", "optimism", "polygon", "solana"];
for (const chain of chains) {
  const { data } = await (await fetch(`https://farbeamlabs.com/api/v1/markets/pools?chain=${chain}`)).json();
  const liq = data.map((p) => p.liquidity_usd ?? 0);
  console.log(chain, data.length, liq.filter((l) => l < 100000).length);
}

import requests

for chain in ["ethereum", "base", "bnb", "arbitrum", "optimism", "polygon", "solana"]:
    data = requests.get("https://farbeamlabs.com/api/v1/markets/pools", params={"chain": chain}, timeout=30).json()["data"]
    liq = [p["liquidity_usd"] or 0 for p in data]
    print(chain, len(data), sum(l < 100000 for l in liq))

The API returns up to 20 pools per chain, and caches them for 5 minutes.

#Pool liquidity by chain

The thresholds are the ones in the liquidity check: below $10,000 is fail, below $100,000 is warn.

Of the 140 pools, 102 (72.9%) reached $100,000. 38 (27.1%) did not, and 3 (2.1%) were below $10,000. OP Mainnet is the outlier, with 15 of 20 pools below $100,000.

Liquidity alone hides how much is trading against it. Solana's median pool traded 4.77 times its liquidity in 24 hours, the highest ratio here. Polygon's traded 0.28 times.

#Pool age

Trending lists on most of these chains are not lists of new pools. On Arbitrum and OP Mainnet the median pool was over two years old. Solana is the exception, with half of its list younger than a week.

#Token checks on a sample

For each chain, the first 6 distinct base tokens in the list went through GET /tokens/{chain}/{address}. That made 42 reports. A report covers the token and sums up to 30 of its pools, so its liquidity figure is often higher than one pool's.

Of the 27 fails, 20 were the top10 check, which includes pool contracts and exchanges in the share. So a high share is common for tokens with most of their supply in a pool, and it is not by itself evidence of a problem. No report in the sample had a honeypot fail.

Unknowns need care. The 21 reports with an unknown are 6 on Solana and 15 on EVM chains. Each Solana report has one, non_transferable, because of a known field defect described in authorities in major Solana mints. On EVM chains, GoPlus returned some fields and left out others. The three OP Mainnet reports with 8 or 9 unknowns have no honeypot, mintable or tax values. Those reports are not cleaner because they show fewer fails, and a missing field is not a pass.

An earlier capture of this sample, made in a fast burst, showed 12 unknown checks on all 6 OP Mainnet reports. We repeated the reports with a gap between calls, and the unknowns fell to between 1 and 9. That points to throttling of the burst, although the report had recorded sources.goplus.ok: true. All 42 reports in the tables above show that same value, so it does not prove that the fields arrived. Count the checks.

#Method

1. Call /markets/pools once per chain.
2. Count each pool by liquidity_usd. Compute median age from created_at, and the ratio of volume_24h_usd to liquidity_usd.
3. Take the first 6 distinct base_token values per chain, and call /tokens/{chain}/{address}.
4. Count checks[].status.

GeckoTerminal does not always answer at once, and a failed call returns 502 upstream_unavailable. Our script retried Polygon and Solana, so those two chains have later times.

#Limits

• One snapshot of a ranking that changes all day. It shows no trend.
• GeckoTerminal decides what trends, and the method is theirs.
• reserve_in_usd is a figure from the aggregator, and a pool's stated liquidity can be manipulated or hard to access.
• Sample of 6 per chain, not random, not representative of all tokens.
• Liquidity thresholds are Farbeam's fixed values, and they do not measure how much you could trade at a given price.
• fail and warn describe fields. They do not rate a token.

Nothing here is a recommendation. It is not financial advice. See the current list on trending pools.