Question

Q44. Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) built on the Solana blockchain that shares liquidity with the Serum decentralized exchange.

• Create a visualization comparing the quantity of swaps and number of unique wallets on Rayidum, Jupiter, and Orca since January 1st.
• What have been the ten most popular tokens to swap and swap for on Raydium during that time period?
• What tokens have become more popular over time?

Hint: Use solana.fact_swaps where block_timestamp::date >= '2022-01-01'

Hint: for labels for token addresses you can join with solana.dim_labels

Hint: swap_programs: raydium v4, jupiter aggregator v2, orca

🧬 Raydium Intro

Raydium is a decentralized AMM (automated market maker) on the Solana blockchain. It draws directly from the order book of Serum, Solana’s largest DEX (decentralized exchange), to run its swap system.

The main advantages of an AMM built on Solana are speed and affordability. In addition, Raydium interacts directly with the Solana ecosystem and with Serum for greater liquidity.

To add liquidity to a pool, you need two tokens. Both tokens have to be deposited at equal value in a pool. In exchange, you receive LP (liquidity provider) tokens, which represent your participation in the pool.

Raydium distributes liquidity in the order book at different prices and in different quantities, according to market demand. Specifically, the protocol relies on the Fibonacci sequence to place up to 20 orders at a time. In the future, Raydium will integrate other liquidity-providing models into its architecture, notably through the use of oracles.

Swap Process

Like any AMM, Raydium features Swap, an essential tool in DeFi, and it couldn’t be easier to use. With Swap, you can exchange two tokens by first selecting the token you already have, followed by the token that you want. This is the first milestone in the use of DeFi and yield farming. Depending on your needs, you can swap all the tokens you have, or only a portion of them.

References

• Raydium Doc
• Learn Raydium - Bybit

👽 Why is Raydium different?

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.

Which Dex is More Popular On Solana?

To assess the popularity of Raydium users, in the first step of the analysis, we will examine the popularity of this exchange compared to other major players in the field in the Solana blockchain.

Key Findings

• Raydium ranks first in the number of swaps, although Jupiter is almost equally popular.
• As we approach the last few days, the popularity of Orca is increasing and the number of raydium transactions is decreasing. The chart below shows the percentage of popularity of these three decentralized exchanges in the last week, in which Raydium is in third place and Orca shows a large growth compared to the beginning of the year.
• On January 24 and March 24, the number of transactions in all three exchanges shows a jump that should be examined more closely.

Unique Wallets Popularity

In the second part of the analysis of the popularity of Solana DEXs, we examine the number of unique users who interacted with each of these exchanges on a daily basis.

First, we consider the first quarter of the year and get the general statistics, and then we examine the daily amount of these statistics. Finally, we look at the number of users in the last week.

Key Findings

• During the first quarter of 2022, Raydium is undisputed in terms of number of users, but as we approach the recent days, its popularity among users has decreased.
• In the last week, Orca has been ranked first in terms of the number of unique users with a large difference compared to other competitors.

Top Swapped For/To Tokens On Raydium

In the next step of the analysis, we look for the tokens that have been swapped the most.

The following diagrams show the result of this part of the work.

Key Findings

• If we look at the charts of the most popular tokens, we find that they are very similar in terms of Swap From/To tokens, and this shows that swaps are usually done in pairs and each swap eventually returns to its original token.
• Among the most popular pairs of tokens, WSOL and USDC tokens are the main part of daily exchanges.

---

---

---

Which token has become more popular over time?

Key Findings

• The Genopets token has risen from 10th at the beginning of the year to 5th in recent days.
• WSOL and USDC have maintained their popularity throughout the first three months of 2022.