Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) built on the Solana blockchain that offers yield farming, staking, token swap and trading, among other features.
The AMM boasts of deep liquidity, frictionless yield farming and lightspeed token swaps.
What can I do on Raydium?
Raydium is the most popular AMM on the Solana chain.
As an AMM Raydium is the perfect place for your yield farming and decentralized token swap on Solana, but it does much more than that.
Below are the features of Raydium.
Trading
Token Swap
Liquidity mining
Farming
Staking
IDO (AcceleRaytor)
1. Trading
Raydium taps into the Serum DEX order book to provide a decentralized trading experience where users can place limit orders.
How to trade on Raydium
First, click to launch the Raydium App and click on Trading. Clicking on the Trading link will taking you to the Radium DEX.
From there, you can select your trading pair (SOL/USDT) as at the top left-hand side of the above screenshot and set your buying or selling prices and amount accordingly as shown on the right-hand side of the above screenshot.
Once you're done setting your price and amount values, just click LIMIT BUY/SELL and wait until your order is filled.
No more waiting around by your laptop to catch your target price anymore. Set it and leave it with Raydium DEX and focus on your normal life.
Trading fees on Raydium DEX is the same as for Swaps -0.25%.
2. Token Swap
Swap one SPL (Solana-based tokens) token for another with Raydium.
Select the tokens you wish to swap and input the amount of the token you wish to swap for the other.
Once done, and you're satisfied with what you will get after the swap, click the Swap button as shown above. That's all. In less than a second, your swap will be complete and the tokens will be in your wallet.
The network fees are so cheap you wouldn't even notice them. It's like 1000X lower than whatever you pay on BSC which is one of the many things that makes Solana interesting.
3. Liquidity Mining
Just like every other AMM protocol, you can mine your favourite SPL tokens on Raydium by adding liquidity to the appropriate liquidity pools.
Every trade that uses your liquidity pool is charged a 0.25% swap fee which is distributed among all liquidity providers in the pool in the same token that they added.
Thus more trading activity means more fees are being generated and the more of the respective tokens you will be able to mine.
4. Yield Farming
You can earn RAY tokens in addition to the trading fees generated through liquidity mining discussed above through Radium farms.
Raydium farms are liquidity pools that allow liquidity providers to use their LP (liquidity provider tokens or receipt) to generate RAY tokens as farming rewards.
To farm RAY you need to deposit your LP token in the appropriate farm on Raydium.
As of the time of writing this post (May 18th), there are only 5 pools that support RAY farming as shown in the above screenshot.
So if you want to farm RAY, you will have to provide liquidity into any of the supported pools and deposit your LP tokens in the respective farms.
5. Staking
You can equally earn more RAY with your RAY tokens by staking it for a nice APR (up to 23%) on Raydium.
6. IDO (AcceleRaytor)
Initial DEX offerings (IDOs) are the new ICO and every centralized exchange and AMM seem to be running one.
As the project team puts it,
"AcceleRaytor is an initiative by Raydium to spearhead the growth of the Solana Ecosystem. It serves as a launchpad for the latest projects to raise capital and drive initial liquidity in a decentralized and interoperable manner while enabling both project and Raydium communities to participate in carefully curated and vetted token offerings".
To qualify to participate in the AcceleRaytor program one must have a minimum of 50 RAY in staking.
If you're qualified to participate by having the minimum required RAY in staking, then you can join any currently running AcceleRaytor pool and specify the amount of USDC you wish to use to buy the new token.
Each qualified participant in the AccelRayto program will be allocated a share of the new token based on their contribution or other criteria that Raydium and the project team proposes.
And once the program is over, you can claim your tokens and the remaining unused funds (if any).
The Raydium (RAY) Token
RAY is the native token of the Raydium protocol and one of my favourite Solana-based tokens.
RAY has a maximum supply of 555,000,000 tokens which makes it a little more appealing compared to the supply of similar tokens on other chains.
And given a similar userbase, TVL, and effective token burn program, the price of RAY should enjoy a more sustainable upside.
Conclusion
I think Raydium has what it takes to become the Uniswap or PancakeSwap of the Solana chain.
What do you think about Raydium and what's been your experience with the Solana-based AMM so far? Share with us in the comments section below.
