Rayium is a decentralized exchange, or DEX, and also providers users with Decentralized financial services (DeFi). It is one of the most promising up and coming new projects for the Solana layer one blockchain.
The Raydium team shares their vision and some of the most exciting developments on their roadmap.
What is your vision for the Raydium Project? And how has it changed compared to when you started?
Raydium is the on-ramp to the Solana ecosystem: we bridge great projects to an amazing community. To users, it’s where you go to swap, earn yields, and participate in the IDOs of your favourite projects.
To our guest projects, it’s a fundraising platform, market maker, and exchange all rolled into one package.
We didn’t launch with the full suite of products, but this is really how we imagined it to be. The difference between then and now is that at the beginning, we rushed out of the gates blazing and trying to make a name for ourselves. As we’ve grown, we’ve also matured and realized the trust our community has put in us, as well as the responsibility we have towards growing the greater Solana ecosystem.
Why did you choose to build in the emerging DeFi space?
We’ve been traders for many years ourselves. We first got into DeFi in the late spring of 2020. We participated in tons of DeFi projects over the course of that summer by swapping, providing liquidity, borrowing and lending, yield farming, and participating in governance.
We loved it. The energy behind communities talking about governance proposals and projects making important financial tools available to everyone was mesmerizing. But the cracks started showing, and by September, Ethereum was unusable for the average person. Fees and wait times were through the roof, so we figured there had to be a better solution. We looked around the market and had a chat with the Serum team. They explained their vision for the future and we could just see the stars aligning as well as the need for Raydium.
The DeFi ecosystem on Solana has grown a lot in a short period of time and Raydium was one of the first applications to really capture the attention of the Solana community.
What were some of the challenges of being this early to a new blockchain platform and how did you overcome them?
On day one of building, there were no projects on Solana aside from Serum, so there was very little existing codebase to reference. This gave us the opportunity to build from scratch and do things our way. Then, as we were building, we found that Solana was moving at a crazy pace. Things that were working yesterday stopped working today because of a new patch. Sometimes these were due to issues we pointed out and had just made workarounds for. The worst was a point where Solana was making 1–2 updates a week and we were struggling just to play catchup.
After launching, things kept moving quickly. Solana had built a good reputation, but there were so few projects in the ecosystem at that point that our pools list had almost no unique tokens in it compared to other platforms, and we feared losing the entire community over the long run because of the lack of a supporting ecosystem.
This set us off to create the first AcceleRaytor program. Not only would we create a launchpad, but we would also help advise projects and get them trading on both Serum and Raydium with enough liquidity for users to actually trade.
Our first AcceleRaytor project was a huge success. So many users participated that we basically ground Solana to a standstill, which made for another first, the first time Solana had seen such heavy traffic. The next month was spent by all our teams going on an RPC building frenzy with each side adding about 10x the number of RPCs they had set up so far.
What words of wisdom do you have for Blockchain project builders and what are some of the ways Raydium can support new projects?
Build it and build it quickly. Solana presents new challenges but also opens a lot of doors. Building from the ground up in a new ecosystem really gives you a chance to think about exactly what problem it is you want to tackle and how you think it should be done. The developer ecosystem is really tight, with everyone helping each other so you’ll never feel alone here. The community support is just amazing with people giving constant constructive feedback and appreciation for what you’re trying to help them with.
The Raydium team is always here to support any project that needs help. We help advise projects on developing, direction, tokenomics, and anything else that you might need. We also have a complete AcceleRaytor program to help with fundraising, marketing and trading across the entire ecosystem.
The Crypto community is excited to see what’s next for Raydium. Can you share any hints on future developments?
To start with, stable swaps should be the next one out the gate. These are designed for high capital efficiency and low fees on tokens that have a strong correlation such as USDC-USDT, synthetic BTC-Wrapped BTC, etc.
After stableswaps, we expect to have the necessary pools for advanced order routing between pools. Want to trade USDT for COPE and can’t find a pair? Raydium will find the route between pools to get you the best price on that swap. These two features combined would not only save users tokens, but would also give new users coming from centralized USDT based exchanges a seamless trading experience on Raydium.
The Sushi partnership has also been in the works for a while now and is getting pretty close to completion. We’re just working on hashing out some final details for user experience and should be ready to launch that in the coming weeks. Governance is also an area that we’ve put a lot of time into. Some things we’ve been very careful of is how to avoid bad actors from misappropriating governance power and building a composable platform that other projects could use as well.