Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) and decentralized exchange built on the Solana blockchain. It launched in February 2021 and was first designed to supply liquidity to the order book of the Serum decentralized exchange.
It became one of the main liquidity hubs in Solana's early DeFi ecosystem. Since then it has expanded into token swaps, liquidity provision and support for new token launches.
Early Raydium stood out by sharing its AMM pool liquidity with a central limit order book. This let liquidity providers take part in order book flow as well as AMM trades.
After the 2022 FTX collapse effectively halted Serum, the ecosystem moved to community forks such as OpenBook. Today Raydium runs standard AMM pools, concentrated liquidity pools (CLMM) and simplified CPMM pools.
Data provided by CoinGecko
RAY is the protocol's native token, with a reported maximum supply of 555 million. A share of trading fees (about 12%) goes to RAY buybacks, and analysts note that the buyback wallet holds a sizable part of circulating supply.
Raydium also runs LaunchLab, a token launch platform, which saw launches and volume jump in 2026 after an outside launch platform moved onto it. Trading in newer assets such as tokenized stocks has also become part of its activity.
Solana's speed and low fees, long-built liquidity and a range of pool types are seen as Raydium's strengths. Its model of routing fee revenue into buybacks also links protocol activity to the token.
On the other hand, a compromised admin key in December 2022 led to funds being drained from some pools. Heavy reliance on activities such as memecoin launches, competition from other exchanges and regulatory change are also risks to consider.
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