Raydium

Raydium operates as an automated market maker (AMM) and serves as a liquidity provider on the Solana blockchain for the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX). What sets Raydium apart from other AMMs is its ability to offer on-chain liquidity to a central limit order book. This means that funds deposited into Raydium are transformed into limit orders that are placed on Serum's order books. This setup allows Raydium liquidity providers to tap into the full range of Serum's order flow and existing liquidity pools.

The native utility token for Raydium is RAY, and it can be used for several purposes:

* Staking to earn fees from the protocol
* Staking to receive allocations for Initial DEX Offerings (IDOs)
* Participating in governance votes to make decisions about the protocol

Raydium launched its main net on February 21, 2021, with an initial creation of 555,000,000 tokens. Of these, 34% are allocated for distribution as liquidity mining incentives over a three-year timeframe. Additionally, 30% of the tokens are designated for partnerships and to foster the growth of the Raydium ecosystem. This includes providing grants to projects that are developing around Raydium or supporting broader community initiatives. Generally, these tokens are locked for the first year and then released gradually over the subsequent two years.

The overall strategic direction, operations, product development, and business growth of Raydium are spearheaded by AlphaRay. With a history in algorithmic trading within the commodities sector, Alpha shifted to market making and liquidity provision for cryptocurrencies in 2017 and has been focused on it ever since. After exploring decentralized finance (DeFi) in the summer of 2020, Alpha identified a demand for an order book AMM to consolidate liquidity. With the debut of Serum, Alpha gathered a team of seasoned trading developers to directly address this requirement.

XRay serves as Raydium's Chief of Technology and leads the development team. With eight years of experience in constructing trading systems and low latency infrastructures for both traditional and crypto markets, X is responsible for designing all of Raydium's systems and architecture as necessary.

GammaRay oversees marketing and communications while also contributing significantly to strategy and product development. Gamma's career includes substantial time at a top data analytics and market research firm, focusing on both client projects and corporate marketing. Before joining Raydium, Gamma specialized in technical analysis and discretionary trading in the cryptocurrency space.

You can buy RAY tokens on an increasing number of exchanges that offer pairs with both cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. Among the most liquid platforms are Raydium.io and gate.io.