Nearly a month after the Raydium Protocol launch on Solana, it is crossing $160 million TVL, $7.6M 24 hour volume and seeing massive growth and adoption.
What is Raydium?
Raydium is an on-chain order book automated market maker (AMM) that enables lightning-fast trades, shared liquidity and new features for earning yield.
Raydium Official Website
Raydium is heavily integrated with Serum including its on-chain central limit order book, where Raydium users have full access to all of the Serum ecosystem order flow, liquidity and security. The whole ecosystem is built on Solana taking advantage of high speed transactions and low fees.
Raydium TVL Growth
The Total Value Locked (TVL) represents the total amount of assets locked up in the DeFi app and is used to show the general health of the project. The total value locked up for Raydium has increased from $5M in Feb to $163M in March. So in 3 weeks the TVL for Raydium has increased by 3268%.
- Raydium Launch – 21st Feb 2021 (Source)
- $5,000,000 – 22nd Feb 2021 (Source)
- $100,238,682 – 9th March 2021 (Source)
- $163,396,943 – 14th March 2021 (Source)
Raydium Search Interest
Google searches over the past month showed peak interest during the launch back on the 21st of Feb 2021. Interestingly, it appears Turkey had over double the search interest over other regions such as United States, South Korea, Australia and Vietnam. Raydium is continually upgrading and adding new features to make it a high speed low transaction fee alternative to the establishing Defi players. It will be interesting to see this interest graph grow over time!
Why Raydium?
For the past 3 years Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has eroding the establishment of the legacy financial system by opening up access of finance tools traditionally only available to the big banks and trading firms.
Ethereum brought decentralized trading, lending, and yield earning to anyone with an internet connection. Furthermore, it did that while ensuring transparency, interoperability, and immutability through the blockchain.
Raydium Blog
The progress above has been revolutionary but Raydium is seeking to be the next Rayvolution of this 😉
- Deliver fast efficient transactions with low fees
- Take advantage of collective ecosystem-wide liquidity pools provided by Serum’s innovative central order book
- First BUIDL features to rival Centralised exchange then deliver new DeFi capabilities thanks to the fast, secure and fee-efficient underlying Solana blockchain
Read more: 7 Reasons Defi Projects will BUIDL on Solana Blockchain
Everything you do on Raydium will most likely involve the $RAY token. You can check out their tokenomics over at their official Raydium Documentation page.
What can you do on Raydium?
Raydium is building out more features than you can poke a stick at. It’s only been 3 weeks since launch and they already have a DEX, Swaps, LP’s, Farming and Staking. By the time I hit publish this post will already be outdated.
How to Use the Raydium DEX
Raydium is similar to all the Serum DEX’s as it’s probably using the same open source code. You need to hit the “connect” button at the top right to hook up your own custodial wallet to the DEX. You can create a new wallet at Sollet.io. From there you select your trading pair at the top left, if you want a limit/market order, then have a look at the order book prices to see what prices people are selling for.
How to Swap on Raydium
Swapping is perhaps the easiest DEX’s of them all. Based off liquidity provided by the pools the price is set for you and you just have to know what you have, and what you want to buy! Again connect your wallet, this time you have four options: Solong, MathWallet, Sollet and Bonfida Wallet.
Once you hook your wallet up you can easily select a token you have in your wallet, to exchange for a desired token. At the time of writing, there were 33 tokens available to swap with.
You can also hit the settings page to change the slippage tolerance! “Slippage” is the expected percentage difference between the quoted price and the executed price.
How to be a Liquidity Provider on Raydium
Connect your wallet, now you have two options to choose 2 coins you have. You can select these coins and the corresponding amount you want to allocate to providing liquidity. Your coins will then become a % of the liquidity pool pair so that you can receive the corresponding fees as a return.
When you make a trade or swap on Raydium the transaction is charged a 0.25% fee. 0.22% is redeposited into the liquidity pool and acts as a reward for liquidity providers. 0.03% is sent to the staking pool and acts as a reward for those staking their RAY tokens.
Raydium Documentation
How to Farm on Raydium
Once you have deposited your liquidity you can then Stake as a Liquidity Provider (LP). Just hit one of the 5 LP’s drop-down arrows and hit “Stake LP”.
Once staked for a little while, you will generate some $RAY which can be “harvested”.
How to Stake $RAY on Raydium
If you only have $RAY well you can also make a return. At the time of writing the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) is 147.63% (expected) and there is total $RAY liquidity of $2.5M !
Don’t Forget…
All of the above is completely decentralised, uses your non-custodial wallet so you own the keys, and as it is running on Solana it is super-fast (0.4 seconds) and super-cheap ($0.00001 transaction fees).
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