Raydium launched on Solana in February 2021, before almost any other major DeFi protocol on the chain. Built by a pseudonymous founder known as AlphaRay and his team, it was the first AMM on Solana to integrate with Serum’s central limit orderbook, giving liquidity providers both passive fees and orderbook liquidity access at the same time. The innovation was elegant — and for a time, nobody else was even trying.
Then FTX collapsed in November 2022, Serum died with it, and Raydium had to fork the Serum codebase overnight to keep functioning. Most observers wrote Raydium off. It was seen as a relic of the SBF era, attached to a broken orderbook. For almost a year it was barely relevant as Orca and Jupiter ate its market share.
Then pump.fun happened. The memecoin launchpad, by design, “graduates” tokens to Raydium when they hit a certain market cap — meaning every successful pump.fun coin automatically created a Raydium liquidity pool. Suddenly Raydium was processing billions of dollars in memecoin volume per day, and the RAY token, which had been sleeping for two years, ripped from under $0.20 to over $5. Daily fees reached millions of dollars, most of it flowing to RAY stakers.
The Raydium story is a lesson in crypto survival: sometimes you don’t win by being the smartest protocol, you win by being in the right place when the next cycle’s meta forms around you. Raydium had never pivoted to memecoins. Memecoins came to Raydium. And because the team had kept the lights on through the dead FTX year, they were ready when the volume arrived. In 2024 Raydium was the single most profitable protocol per unit of TVL in all of DeFi.
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