Overview

An overview of Project Serum and its vision.

📖 What is Serum?

Serum is a protocol and ecosystem that brings unprecedented speed and low transaction costs to decentralized finance. It is built on Solana and is completely permissionless. Ecosystem partners can compose with Serum’s on-chain central limit orderbook to share liquidity and power markets-based features for institutional and retail users.

More specifically, Serum's on-chain central limit order book and matching engine provides liquidity and price-time-priority matching to traders and composing projects. Users benefit from this exchange model through the ability to choose the price, size and direction of their trades. Composing projects benefit from Serum’s existing architecture, bootstrapped liquidity, and matching service.

🕰️ History

In light of the popularity of DeFi and the growth of DEXes on Ethereum, users and developers were limited by high gas costs and slow transactions. Serum's aim was to solve these problems, and improve issues of centralization, capital inefficiency, and liquidity segmentation.

Serum launched on the 31st of August 2020 and was one of the first major open source projects to build on Solana. It is supported by the Serum Foundation, and backed by a consortium of experts in cryptocurrency trading and decentralized finance, including FTX, Alameda Research, and the Solana Foundation.

⚗️ What Serum Offers

• Serum Core

  • Asset Agnostic order book for matching any Solana based trading product from options, futures, borrow lending positions, or any financial and non-financial instrument that can take advantage of Serum’s backend matching engine.

• True Composability

  • Serum makes it possible for a diverse range of applications and participants to share middleware in one place. The design of the AOB makes Serum’s architecture more suited to modularity. Programs that use Serum will have more flexibility, all while maintaining some standard design principles and composability.

• Developer Ecosystem and Services

  • Decentralized on chain order matching service that provides infrastructure for trading applications, giving developers full control and flexibility.

  • Permissioned markets allow for even greater flexibility and compliance.

  • Serum DEX, built on top of the Asset Agnostic Order book provides the ecosystem with a greater source of pooled liquidity and shared resource to power based trading features.

• Serum Token (SRM)

  • SRM is the utility and governance token of the Serum ecosystem

  • SRM will be fully integrated into Serum and benefit from buy/burn of fees

• Solana Speeds and Costs

  • Solana allows for sub-second trading and settlement on top of ultra-low transaction costs of $0.00001 per transaction

🔮 Ultimate Vision

The Ultimate Vision behind Serum is to drive the global mass adoption of DeFi. One conceptualization of this goal includes the milestones of reaching 1 billion users and $10T of on-chain value.

An Ultimate Vision for SerumMedium