Raydium

Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) built on the Solana blockchain which leverages the central order book of the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX) to enable lightning-fast trades, shared liquidity and new features for earning yield.

Other AMM DEXs and DeFi protocols are only able to access liquidity within their own pools and have no access to a central order book. Additionally, with the majority of platforms running on Ethereum, transactions are slow and gas fees are high.

Raydium offers a few key advantages:

• Faster and cheaper: Raydium leverages the efficiency of the Solana blockchain to achieve transactions magnitudes faster than Ethereum and gas fees which are a fraction of the cost.

• A central order book for ecosystem-wide liquidity: Raydium provides on-chain liquidity to the central limit order book of the Serum DEX, meaning that Raydium allows access to the order flow and liquidity of the entire Serum ecosystem.

• Trading interface: For traders who want to be able to view TradingView charts, set limit orders and have more control over their trading.

Methodology

For the first question, a query on the solana.fact_swaps table with a CTE per DEX was created using count (tx_id) as the number of swaps and count (distinct swapper) as the number of unique wallets to compare all three. The time was constrained between '2022-01-01' and CURRENT_DATE - 1 to prevent showing the last point in the graph with missing data. These three tables where joined and a resulting table with 6 columns, 2 metrics for 3 different DEXes was created.

For the second question, two subsequent joins between solana.fact_swaps and the solana.dim_labels tables are made to add a label to the swap_from_mint and swap_to_mint and use the token address_name instead of the address which is given in the solana.fact_swaps table.

Then, a count (tx_id) as number of swap is used as the popularity measurement for the top 10 swapped from and swapped to tokens as well as the top 10 most swapped token pair.

To obtain the token which increased popularity over time, a similar structure is used but filtering the top 20 swapped from and to tokens and visually identifiying on a plot which were the most significant in terms of increased number of swaps. Then a visualization with only these was made, to improve readibility over a bunch of lines where no single color is easily identifiable.

Results

Figure 1. and 2. show the number of swaps and unique wallets per day since January 1st 2022 for Raydium, Jupiter and Orca.

The first one shows the dominance of Jupiter over Orca and Raydium, being around 5 times bigger than Orca and 10 times bigger that Raydium in number of swaps. Orca has had a very significant increase throughout March, almost tripling its actitity between March 1st and 31st while Raydium stayed on the same level. The Y-axis is in log-scale to allow for better comparison of the three curves.

The second one shows the significant increase of Orca even better. As of March 31st, it is the AMM on Solana with more users, almost 30k, and trending upwards. Raydium is the second with more users but is trending downwards, since it opened the year peaking to 30k and is now around 16k. Jupiter, on the contrary has mantained a lower level between 4k and 8k users daily for all 2022.

Conclusions

Raydium was the AMM with more number of unique wallets in Q3 but has been recently overtaken by Orca, which is on a very positive trend. Raydium needs to give an answer to this if they want to stay relevant a in the DEX ecosystem in Solana. Most activity in Raydium evolves around USDC and wrapped SOL swaps, being its native token RAYDIUM the third most swapped from and to token.

Genopets is currently a very popular token in the AMM. It is the native token of a move-to-earn NFT game.

Raydium's swap feature allows two tokens to be exchanged quickly through Serum, while the DEX UI also allows for more advanced trading features such as limit orders. These make for a better trading experience for users. Additionally, there are a number of ways to earn RAY tokens while farming liquidity pools and staking.

Source

Introduction

This bounty will analyse metrics for Raydium and compare them with Jupiter and Orca.

Jupiter

Jupiter is the key liquidity aggregator for Solana, offering the widest range of tokens and best route discovery between any token pair.

Jupiter directly connects all DEX markets and AMM pools together no matter the provider and will find all direct and 2-hop routes between any two tokens on Solana.

Source

Orca

Orca claims to be the easiest, fastest and most user-friendly AMM in Solana. It was launched by two software engineers with the focus on the human-centered digital design.

Source

Figures 3. and 4. shows the top 10 tokens swapped from and to respectively. Both lists are almost identical, the only difference being the position of wrapped ETH on sollet as top 7 swapped from (Fig. 3) and top 10 in swapped to (Fig. 4).

USDC and wrapped SOL are top 2 with significant advantage over the rest in both graphs. RAYDIUM and USDT in third and fourth position also have a significant advantage over the rest, especially as swapped to tokens.

It raised my attention that two similar tokens, Star Atlas and Star Atlas DAO populated the list, but they are two different tokens with 64M USD and 48M USD marketcap respectively from the Star Atlas strategy game.

Figure 5. shows the top 10 swapped pairs, with USDC-wrapped SOL and wrapped SOL-USDC as the top pairs with significant advantage over wrapped-USDT and USDT-wrapped SOL on third and fourth place.

Figure 6. and 7. show the swapped from and to tokens which gained significant popularity since January 2022.

As swapped to tokens, Genopets saw an incredible 10 times more swaps end of March compared to January 1st. Raydium and Serum increased around 100% their daily activity.

As swapped to tokens, Genopets, Lido staked SOL and Sushitoken (wrapped through Wormhole) saw explosive increase in their popularity, while Raydium confirmed the trend from Figure 6. as well.