Solana

This guide explains the design choice behind building Serum DEX on Solana blockchain.

Why Solana

Solana is a fast, secure, and censorship resistant blockchain providing the open infrastructure required for global adoption. Serum is built on the Solana blockchain. Solana was selected for its performance and technical innovations, allowing it to achieve low transaction latency (by blockchain standards), high throughput, and low fees.

Serum's founders recognized a potential for DeFi to reach 1 billion users and $10T of on-chain value. This is no small ambition, and current blockchain limitations encouraged the choice to build on Solana and to address these issues at Layer-1.

Specifications

Solana's blockchain is designed to scale natively without sacrificing decentralization or security to be able to support billions of users and devices:

Supporting 50k transactions per seconds (TPS)
Block times of approximately 400ms
Network fees of $0.0001 per transaction
No sharding required

These specs allow Solana to handle hundreds of orders per second per market. Solana is also built to scale with Moore's Law, doubling in capacity around every two years with hardware and processing improvements. The current foreseeable roadmap envisions 1m TPS and 150ms block times.

Bridges

On October 2020, Solana announced Wormhole, a secure and decentralized bridge to Ethereum. Wormhole, the product of a partnership with Certus One, will be first of many decentralized cross-chain bridges on Solana.

Wormhole allows existing projects, platforms, and communities to move tokenized assets seamlessly across blockchains to benefit from Solana’s high speed and low cost.

Developers can employ Wormhole to access the high-speed and low-cost benefits of the Solana network instead of rewriting their codebase for Solana. Note also that any ERC20 can be wrapped as a Solana Program Library token.

Builders need not constrict themselves to a single chain if they wish to leverage the community of one chain with the performance of another.

Why Solana

Specifications

Bridges

Further Reading