Raydium Swaps

    Analyzing DEX Markets on Solana

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    What Is Raydium?

    Raydium is a decentralized exchange that lives on the Solana blockchain. It uses an Automated Market Maker (AMM) algorithm to execute swaps. However, it is also partnered with a service called Serum which operates an order book that is sometimes utilized by Raydium. So Raydium combines an AMM with order books to find prices that are relatively cheap for the end-user.

    However, Raydium is not the only player in the game when it comes to decentralized exchanging on the Solana platform. There are the likes of Jupiter and Orca who also offer competitive low-fee trading. How is the trading market faring across these DEXes on Solana? We shall investigate and address these in this publication.

    Market Statistics

    In this section, the goal is to investigate the Market share of Raydium, Jupiter, and Orca based on transaction count. The period under analysis is from January 1, 2022. The timeseries chart below shows us the daily transaction account across the three decentralized exchanges since January 2022.

    We can see that Raydium began the year leading in transaction count but Jupiter quickly caught up while Orca was trailing behind. Orca was able to catch up finally in late May as the three DEXs boast of about 40k - 80k transactions daily.

    In the next visualization, which is a donut chart, we shall look at the unique number of users that have patronized services on the three decentralized exchanges. Users in this context are proxies for Solana wallets.

    Raydium has the biggest share of unique wallets with 53.7%, followed by Orca with 26.1%, and Jupiter with 20.2%.

    Token Popularity On Raydium

    The next metric to assess is the popularity of tokens swapped from and swapped to on Raydium. Popularity in this context is defined as the number of times a token was involved in a trade. Metrics in this section are divided into two parts to represent the opposite sides of a trade.

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    The first chart on popularity we will look at the coins being swapped most on Raydium. USDC is the most popular "swapped from" with 35.5% of all swaps since April 7, 2022. In the second position is swapped SOL with 20%, and Raydium (token) with 8.76%

    On the second chart on popularity, we will look at the coins being "swapped to" the most on Raydium. USDC leads again with 34.7% followed by wrapped SOL, Raydium and USDT in that order.

    Conclusion

    By analyzing transactions on Raydium, Jupiter, and Orca, we have learned that these 3 decentralized exchanges rub shoulders in terms of daily transactions, however, Raydium sees more unique users on a daily. This means that Raydium is more appealing to users new to the Solana ecosystem while Orca and Jupiter are better at retaining old users.

    It was also found out that the 3 most popular "coins" on Raydium are:

    1. USD Coin
    2. Wrapped SOL
    3. Raydium