Learn about the breakthrough of Raydium—Solana ecosystem in one article
"As a builder, it all makes sense when you see that you've solved a real-world problem and made a positive impact on people's lives."
Welcome to Seum Story #4
This year, both Serum and Solana have achieved very strong results, and the ecosystem has begun to flourish and prolific. One application that has been particularly notable since its launch is Raydium - a full-fledged hybrid AMM solution that brings centralized liquidity to Solana with the help of Serum's central order book. Raydium cleverly solves the shortcomings of the traditional AMM model by showing how an automated market maker (AMM) can be directly combined with Serum's market maker, demonstrating the synergy behind composability.
This week, we invited AlphaRay, the founder of Raydium. In this week's interview, the Raydium team shares with us their vision, their advice for new teams, their most memorable experiences, and even some of the most exciting developments on their roadmap.
Share directory:
- Introducing Raydium
- Founder's story
- Build from scratch
- Share liquidity with Serum
- Suggestions for new projects
- Product Vision
- What makes it all worth it!
interview content
1. You are one of the veterans of the Serum ecosystem, please take 30 seconds to introduce Raydium to those who do not know. Is there any difference now compared to how you described Raydium when you started?
Raydium is the gateway to the Solana ecosystem, where we connect great projects to an amazing community. For users, Raydium is the place to exchange, earn revenue and participate in IDOs of your favorite projects. For the project, it is a platform that integrates a fundraising platform, a market maker and an exchange.
We didn't launch the full line initially, but that's exactly how we envisioned it. The difference between then and now is that, in the beginning, we were full of passionate, fiery yearning to make a name for ourselves. As we continue to grow, we have matured and realized the trust the community has placed in us and our responsibility to grow the Solana ecosystem.
2. The Raydium team has extensive experience in high frequency trading in both traditional and crypto markets, can you share the story behind the creation of the project and why you chose to build in DeFi?
We have been traders ourselves for many years. Our first foray into DeFi was in late spring 2020. During that summer, we participated in a large number of DeFi projects, including exchanges, providing liquidity, borrowing and lending, liquidity mining and participating in governance.
We enjoy it. The energy behind communities discussing governance proposals and projects that make vital financial tools accessible to everyone is fascinating. But obvious shortcomings also began to appear. By September, Ethereum was no longer available to ordinary people, and the fees and waiting time exceeded the limit that users could bear. So we thought there must be a better solution. We watched the market and talked to the Serum team. They explained their vision of the future, the big picture we can see in the future, and the need for a product like Raydium.
3. The DeFi ecosystem on Solana has grown a lot in a short period of time, and Raydium is one of the first applications to really capture the focus of the Solana ecosystem. What are the challenges of "being the first"? How did you overcome these challenges?
When building started, there were no projects on Solana other than Serum, so there was little existing codebase to reference. This gave us the opportunity to build from the ground up and do things our way. As we were building, we found that Solana was growing at an insane pace. What worked yesterday, doesn't work today because of a new patch. Sometimes these are caused by us pointing out the problem and just doing the solution. At its worst, Solana was updating 1-2 times a week, and we had to work hard to catch up.
After the launch, things continued to develop rapidly. Solana built a solid reputation, but at the time there were very few projects in the ecosystem, and compared to other platforms, there were few unique tokens in our pool list, and we feared losing out in the long run due to the lack of a supportive ecosystem the whole community.
This prompted us to start creating the AcceleRaytor platform. We not only create the launch platform, but also advise and help projects to get them traded on Serum and Raydium and provide enough liquidity for users to actually trade.
Our first AcceleRaytor project was a huge success. The sheer amount of user engagement that basically brought Solana to a standstill made it the first time we've seen Solana have this much traffic. All of our teams went on an RPC building frenzy for the next month, with each party increasing the number of RPCs they had built so far by a factor of 10 or so.
4. Raydium is the first automated market maker to share liquidity with Serum’s decentralized on-chain order book. The opportunity this idea brings to DeFi is truly a breakthrough for the entire industry. In the long run, do you think this trend will continue? How do you think it will shape the future of financial markets?
First, we should dig into what it means to share liquidity with Serum. When users add tokens to Raydium's liquidity pool, the AMM breaks down the K=X*Y equation and turns those tokens into limit orders that are placed on Serum's order book for anyone to place on Serum trade.
On the other hand, when a user makes a Swap, Raydium will look for the best price between the order book and our AMM assets, and then execute the trade that yields the best price for the user. This model is one of our core innovations and has use cases across the ecosystem.
Multiple centralized exchanges approached our team to bring our liquidity and order book functionality to their exchanges. While there are some areas for improvement, we believe there will be centralized exchanges that adopt this model as it is indeed a step up from many of the grid trading bots they have built so far.
5. As the ecosystem grows, we see a flywheel effect of teams wanting to learn more about Serum and Solana. What advice do you have for builders about to make this leap, and what are the ways Raydium can support new projects?
Build it and build it fast. Solana brings new challenges, but also opens many doors. Building from the ground up in a new ecosystem really gives you the opportunity to think about what problem you want to solve and how you think it should be done. The developer ecosystem is very tight and everyone is helping each other, so you never feel alone here. The community support is amazing, people keep giving constructive feedback and appreciating you for trying to help them.
The Raydium team is on hand to support any project that needs help. We help projects with development, product direction, advice on token economic models, and anything else that may be required. We also have a full AcceleRaytor project to help with project fundraising, marketing and transactions across the ecosystem.
6. The community is excited to see what's next for Raydium. Can you share some clues about future developments for our readers?
First of all, stable trading pairs should be next in the market. These are designed to provide high capital efficiency and low fees for tokens with strong correlations (such as USDC-USDT, synthetic BTC-Wrapped BTC, etc.).
After stabilizing trading pairs, we expect the next step to be advanced order routing across pools. Want to exchange USDT for COPE, but can't find a trading pair? Raydium will find a path between pools to get you the best price on that exchange. These two features combine to not only save users tokens, but also allow new users from USDT-based exchanges to have a seamless trading experience on Raydium.
The collaboration with Sushi has also been in the works for a while and is nearing completion. We're working hard to iron out some of the final details of the user experience, which should roll out in the next few weeks. Governance is also an area where we spend a lot of time, and some of the things we've been very focused on are how to prevent bad actors from usurping governance power, and building a composable platform that other projects can also use.
7. Would you like to share some of your positive or favorite experiences so far as a builder? what would you say made it all"worth"？
Comments like these, we set out on this mission to help those who can't afford expensive gas and give them tools that the traditional financial world wouldn't.
As a builder, it all starts to make sense when you see that you've solved a real-world problem and made a positive difference in people's lives.
We hope you enjoyed this interview!
You can keep up to date with the Raydium team and development through these channels:
Discord：https://discord.gg/6EvFwvCfpx
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RaydiumProtocol
Weibo: https://weibo.com/u/7573315825
Official website: https://raydium.io
This article is from Raydium, reproduced with permission.
