The decentralised autonomous organization (DAO) of Project Serum (Serum), a protocol delivering the underlying liquidity infrastructure to decentralised applications built on the Solana blockchain, has voted to approve the launch of a Liquidity Mining Programme (the Programme) with an initial allocation of USD100 million.
This newest offering from Serum aims to attract more users to its growing ecosystem and further build on top of the protocol, which has seen its Total Value Locked (TVL) increase by 350 per cent over the past three months, exceeding USD1.5 billion TVL as of 12 October, 2021.
While DeFi has proven to be great for permissionless swaps, most DeFi applications silo liquidity into their own pools, segmenting trading activity in a way that limits institutional interest. Serum provides users with an on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) that allows projects built on the Solana blockchain to share liquidity across the entire ecosystem.
To support existing projects and further incentivise new ones, Serum’s community, the driving force behind its continued success, voted to launch a liquidity mining program with USD100 million in rewards allocated for Automated Market Makers (AMMs) that interact directly with Serum’s on-chain order book. As the Solana ecosystem continues to grow, this is an important opportunity for Serum to give back to composing projects and improve its economics.
“Serum has already proven that an on-chain order book is a key primitive for Solana-based mass appeal applications. With this announcement, Serum is set to further reduce its trading friction and increase composability which will encourage innovation, appeal to new users, and bring the Serum and Solana ecosystem closer to a goal of 1 billion users on-chain,” says Matthew Graham, CEO of Sino Global Capital and early investor in Serum.
As part of the Program, Serum’s native SRM token will be allocated to participating AMMs to be distributed alongside each platform’s existing token incentives. It aims to target both new and existing projects that share liquidity with Serum for a range of major liquid trading pairs. The initial token rollout will include pairs such as BTC, ETH and SOL against USDC and begin with Atrix Finance. Raydium, the largest DeFi application on Serum by TVL, and Mercurial Finance, have also expressed interest in joining the Program.
“We’re looking forward to working with Serum to support the ecosystem and bring its unique services to a wider audience,” says Alpha Ray, Founder of Raydium. “Incentivizing AMMs to interact with Serum’s on-chain CLOB will in turn bring more users onto the platform, which will only benefit the protocol as a whole.
“We are delighted to be working with Serum on their latest ecosystem initiative. By combining Mercurial’s expertise in innovative AMM infrastructure with Serum’s decentralised order book system, we will be launching new liquidity systems that further improve utility and yield for stables on Solana,” says Ming, Founding Team of Mercurial Finance.
“Users of AMMs can add liquidity to Serum using Atrix with the same familiar process,” says Kaiba from Atrix Finance. “The tokens are then placed directly on to Serum’s order book, increasing liquidity for the ecosystem.”
