It is an automated market maker (AMM) and decentralized exchange that lives on the Solana blockchain. You can swap one token for another, or deposit a pair of tokens into a pool and earn a share of the trading fees.

It launched in February 2021 and is run by three pseudonymous co-founders who go by AlphaRay, XRay, and GammaRay. There is no publicly named individual founder, so you trust the code and the track record rather than a face.

How many RAY tokens are there?

RAY has a fixed hard cap of 555 million tokens, set at the start, and the supply never grows past it. Around 12% of trading fees are used to buy RAY back off the market.

What happened to Raydium when FTX collapsed?

Raydium leaned on Serum's order book, and FTX held the key that could change Serum's code. When FTX fell in November 2022, the community forked Serum into OpenBook, and Raydium moved its order-book link over to OpenBook by mid-December 2022.

No.190

📒 Codex Mcap · Solana DeFi

Raydium RAY

Solana's flagship AMM

🎭 a ray that rides Solana's fastest currents and spins them into trading whirlpools

📜 Smart Contract

ALTROOKIE CODEX

💬 “I run on Solana's current, so swaps clear fast and cheap. I used to pour my pools into Serum's order book until it sank with FTX. I tied my lines to OpenBook instead and kept flowing.”

💬 TL;DR

What: an AMM and DEX on Solana — swap tokens, or supply liquidity and earn fees.
Feb 2021: launched as Solana's flagship AMM, built to feed liquidity into the Serum order book.
Nov–Dec 2022: FTX took down Serum, so Raydium re-rooted on OpenBook, the community fork.
Supply: hard-capped at 555 million RAY — it never mints past that.

📖 The Story

February 21, 2021. Raydium went live on Solana as the chain's flagship automated market maker. Solana was fast and cheap, and Raydium was built to make the most of that, letting people swap tokens in a blink for a few cents in fees.

What set it apart was a clever trick. Most AMMs keep their own little pools, walled off from everyone else. Raydium instead routed its pool liquidity into Serum, a shared on-chain order book for the whole Solana ecosystem. So a trade on Raydium could meet orders from the wider market, not just whatever sat in one pool. The two were tightly bonded, and for a while that bond was a strength.

November 2022. The bond became a danger. FTX, the giant exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy, and it came out that FTX held the key that could change Serum's code. A market that millions of dollars depended on was suddenly sitting under a fallen titan's control. Within days the community copied Serum's code into a fresh version they ran themselves and named it OpenBook.

Mid-December 2022. Raydium cut its lines to Serum for good and tied them to OpenBook instead. The whirlpool kept spinning, now over a current nobody could quietly pull the plug on. Raydium had ridden out the worst week of its life and come through still flowing.

📊 Stats

⚡Speed Rides Solana's fast lane

🌊Liquidity depth Shared via the order book

🧩Ecosystem role A core Solana DEX

🎢Volatility Moves with DeFi cycles

💎Scarcity Hard cap of 555M

🧩 How it works

Raydium is a smart-contract app, not a blockchain of its own. It runs on Solana, a proof-of-stake chain, so it borrows Solana's speed and low fees instead of running any consensus itself. The core idea is the AMM: people called liquidity providers deposit a pair of tokens into a pool, traders swap against that pool, and the providers collect a slice of every fee.

💧 LPs fund the 🌊 pool and earn 💰 fee shares back, 🔄 traders swap against it — and the pool also feeds a 📖 shared order book (Serum, now OpenBook).

🌗 Light & Shadow

🌕 Light

Fast and cheap to trade because it rides Solana's high-speed current, swaps clear in moments for tiny fees
One of Solana's core DEXs, with pools, farms, and a token-launch platform built in
A fixed cap of 555 million RAY, and about 12% of trading fees go to buying RAY back off the market

🌑 Shadow

Its fate is tied to Solana, when the chain has an outage or stumbles, Raydium stops with it
The 2022 Serum and FTX mess showed how a borrowed dependency can turn into a sudden risk
The three co-founders are pseudonymous, there is no named person standing behind the project

🧬 Evolution lineage

Raydium is not a fork of another coin, it is a DeFi app born in the Solana ecosystem. Its market plumbing is what has a lineage: it was built on Serum, and after Serum died with FTX, that role passed to OpenBook, a community hard fork of Serum.

📕 Serum 📖 OpenBook 🌊 Raydium

🧭 Meet other friends

◎ Solana 🪐 Jupiter

See the whole codex →

❓ FAQ

What is Raydium?: It is an automated market maker (AMM) and decentralized exchange that lives on the Solana blockchain. You can swap one token for another, or deposit a pair of tokens into a pool and earn a share of the trading fees.
Who created Raydium?: It launched in February 2021 and is run by three pseudonymous co-founders who go by AlphaRay, XRay, and GammaRay. There is no publicly named individual founder, so you trust the code and the track record rather than a face.
How many RAY tokens are there?: RAY has a fixed hard cap of 555 million tokens, set at the start, and the supply never grows past it. Around 12% of trading fees are used to buy RAY back off the market.
What happened to Raydium when FTX collapsed?: Raydium leaned on Serum's order book, and FTX held the key that could change Serum's code. When FTX fell in November 2022, the community forked Serum into OpenBook, and Raydium moved its order-book link over to OpenBook by mid-December 2022.

⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only