Raydium

Raydium is a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana. It went live in 2021 as Solana's first automated market maker, or AMM. An AMM is a set of smart contracts that hold pools of tokens and price each trade by formula. There is no order book and no middleman. On Raydium you can swap tokens, earn fees by adding to pools, launch a new token, and trade tokenized stocks. Part of every trading fee buys back the RAY token.

Many Solana swaps reach Raydium without the trader ever opening raydium.io. Aggregators such as Jupiter JUP$0.364-4.5% send orders through its pools. In 2026 Raydium also became the main home for tokenized stocks on Solana, passing $6 billion in total stock volume in October 2026.

How does Raydium work? Swaps, pools and fees

Raydium works by pooling two tokens in a smart contract and letting anyone trade against the pool. People who deposit tokens, called liquidity providers or LPs, earn most of the trading fee. The rest is the protocol's cut, and most of that buys back RAY.

The split depends on the pool type, per Raydium's fee docs:

Take a $1,000 swap in a 0.25% CPMM pool. You pay $2.50 in fees. LPs get $2.10, $0.30 goes to RAY buybacks, and $0.10 goes to the treasury (protocol fee docs).

Fees are a percentage of the trading fee, not of your trade. Price impact on a thin pool usually costs you far more than the fee does.

Raydium liquidity pools: CLMM, CPMM, AMM v4 and stable pools

Raydium runs several pool programs side by side. Each suits a different kind of liquidity provider. The docs recommend CPMM for new standard pools and CLMM for ranged positions. AMM v4 still runs, but new deployments are discouraged.

CLMM (concentrated liquidity). You choose a price range, and your deposit earns fees only while the price stays inside it. That puts your capital to work harder than a standard pool, but you have to manage the range. Each position is an NFT. In May 2026 Raydium added limit orders, single-sided fee collection and dynamic fees to CLMM, and Sec3 audited that update.

CPMM (constant product). This is the "set it and forget it" pool: you deposit both tokens and earn fees across every price. CPMM issues ordinary LP tokens and supports Token-2022, Solana's newer token standard. On 9 September 2026 Raydium removed CPMM's hardcoded Token-2022 whitelist (changelog).

AMM v4. This is the original 2021 program. It used to place orders on the OpenBook order book as well. On 22 July 2026 Raydium removed that dependency, so an OpenBook outage no longer affects AMM v4 swaps. Its fee structure is frozen at 0.25%.

Stable AMM. This pool type is for pairs that should trade near 1:1, such as two stablecoins. It dropped its OpenBook code on 22 June 2026.

Burn & Earn. Raydium's liquidity locker lets a project lock its LP position for good while still claiming the trading fees. Halborn audited it in late 2024.

What is Raydium Authority V4?

"Raydium Authority V4" is the label explorers give the AMM v4 program's pool authority. Raydium's glossary defines a pool authority as an account controlled by the program that signs transfers out of pool vaults. There is one per program, not one per pool. Seeing it in your wallet history means you traded against an AMM v4 pool. It does not mean someone has access to your wallet.

Raydium LaunchLab: the token launchpad behind StonkFun

LaunchLab is Raydium's open token launchpad. Anyone can use it. A new token first trades on a bonding curve, a formula that raises the price as more is sold. When the curve hits its target, the token "graduates" and LaunchLab builds a Raydium pool from the money raised. LaunchLab went live in April 2025, after Pump.fun moved its tokens to its own AMM.

Other launchpads can run on LaunchLab under their own brand. The biggest is StonkFun, which pairs new tokens with tokenized stocks and ETFs. StonkFun moved all new launches to LaunchLab in September 2026. Raydium then let launches use any quote token and cut the deploy cost by about 90%. The Block reported RAY up about 46% the next day.

LaunchLab's rules changed several times in August and September 2026 (changelog):

• CPMM-only graduation (17 August). New launches graduate into a CPMM pool, not AMM v4. We covered it in Raydium LaunchLab mandates CPMM-only graduation.
• Locked LP goes to the platform. For tokens that graduate after that upgrade, the creator's share of locked LP is merged into the launch platform's Fee Key, the NFT that collects locked-LP fees. Creators no longer get a separate Fee Key. Creator trading fees still apply (creator fee docs).
• New quote assets. Token-2022 quote tokens were enabled on 24 August.
• Higher platform fee cap. The cap on what a launch platform can charge rose from 2.5% to 5% on 26 August.
• Protocol share of creator fees. From 19 September, Raydium can keep part of the creator fees earned in CPMM pools.

If you launch through another platform, check its fee settings first. Since August those platforms control more of the money than they used to.

LaunchLab drove Raydium's growth in 2025. In Q3 2025 it earned more than half of Raydium's revenue, per Messari. If you only need a basic token with no bonding curve, see the alternatives section.

Tokenized stocks and permissioned pools on Raydium

Most on-chain trading of Solana tokenized stocks happens on Raydium. Stock tokens from xStocks AAPLx$335.13+0.6%, such as TSLAx and SPYx, trade in Raydium pools at any hour. So do stocks listed through Backpack Securities and Sunrise. In September 2026 Raydium said it handled over 90% of this DEX volume on Solana. See also our report on Raydium's Q3 2026 stock volume.

In July 2026 Raydium added permissioned pools for regulated assets. The issuer decides which wallets may trade. So a stock token that needs ID checks can still use Raydium's pools, with no need for its own exchange. Superstate was the first partner (CoinMarketCal via TradingView; our coverage: Raydium and Uniswap launch KYC-gated pools).

Under the hood, an approved operator can create several CLMM pools for the same pair (changelog). Since August, a CLMM position can also be frozen when the issuer freezes the token inside it. If you provide liquidity for a regulated token, the issuer's rules apply to your position too.

A tokenized stock is not the share itself. xStocks, for example, track the price but carry no voting rights. Read the issuer's terms before you treat one like a brokerage holding.

Raydium Perps: perpetual futures powered by Orderly

Raydium Perps lets you trade perpetual futures, contracts that track an asset's price with leverage and no expiry. It launched in January 2025 on Orderly Network ORDER$0.036-0.3%'s order book (announcement). Orderly runs the matching engine, not Raydium's own programs.

Leverage goes up to 100x depending on the market. Margin is cross-margin only: all your collateral backs every open position, so one bad trade can drag down the rest. You can deposit USDC, SOL, USDT, ETH, BNB, WBTC and some stablecoins, and profit and loss settle in USDC. Maker fees are zero (Perps docs).

Raydium Perps is not available to US residents or to users in a list of sanctioned regions.

RAY token: supply, buybacks and how to stake Raydium

RAY is Raydium's token. Its supply is fixed at 555 million and mint authority is disabled, so no new RAY can be created (RAY docs). Its main source of demand is the buyback: 12% of pool trading fees buys RAY on the open market.

By 31 August 2026, Raydium said, buybacks had bought more than 30% of RAY in circulation. The pace rises and falls with trading. In early August it hit its fastest rate since early 2026.

The supply was allocated as follows:

Team and seed vesting ended on 21 February 2024. The mining reserve pays out about 1.9 million RAY a year in rewards.

To stake RAY, open the staking page in the Raydium app, deposit RAY and claim rewards as they build up. Staking is optional; you don't need RAY to swap or add liquidity. Staking one token alone carries no impermanent loss, the loss LPs take when pool prices move. Our RAY token page tracks price and holders. Coinbase listed RAY in January 2026.

Is Raydium safe? Audits, admin keys and past hacks

Raydium is mature and heavily audited, but it is not risk-free. It has been hacked twice, and its code can still be changed. Your funds stay in your own wallet until you trade or deposit. Once deposited, they sit in Raydium's programs. Those are only as safe as their code and the keys that control it.

Who can change the code. Every Raydium program can be upgraded by a 3-of-4 Squads multisig, and a 24-hour timelock delays each upgrade. A separate 3-of-5 treasury multisig, with no timelock, can pause AMM v4 pools, change fees on existing pools and create new fee tiers (admin docs). No Raydium program is immutable. A timelock gives watchers a day to spot a bad upgrade, but you are still trusting the signers.

Audits. Each audit covers a specific program and version (audit list):

The changes from July to September 2026 (OpenBook removal, permissioned pools, the LaunchLab rule changes) came after the latest listed audit. Raydium's Immunefi bug bounty pays up to $505,000 for a critical bug and has paid out $3.4 million in total.

Incidents. In December 2022 an attacker stole a private key that controlled pool authority and drained about $4.4 million. The cause was a compromised key, not a code bug. On 10 June 2026 an attacker drained $1.34 million from five pools on the long-retired AMM v3 program by faking LP tokens (Crypto Briefing). Raydium said current pools were not affected and that it would repay losses from its treasury. The lesson: old code that is still deployed is still attack surface.

Everyday risks. Concentrated positions stop earning when price leaves your range. Anyone can create a pool, so copycat tokens use real names, including fake "RAY" tokens. Check the mint address before you buy, and don't trust a ticker alone.

Who should use Raydium?

Raydium suits you best if you provide liquidity on Solana and want every pool type in one place. It also fits teams launching a token that want a bonding curve that moves into a real pool on its own. And it is the main place to trade tokenized stocks on-chain when Wall Street is closed.

It suits you less if you only swap now and then. Jupiter checks Raydium and every other DEX, so it usually matches or beats the price. CLMM is a poor fit if you can't check your positions often. A CPMM pool or plain RAY staking needs less care.

Is Raydium available in the USA? Raydium Perps bars US residents outright. For spot trading on raydium.io, reviews such as CryptoSlate's describe limits for US users too. Read the site's terms before you connect. People in the US can still buy RAY on Coinbase.

Raydium vs Jupiter, Orca, Meteora and Pump.fun

Raydium holds the pools; Jupiter finds the best route through them. For a plain swap, Jupiter usually gets you the same price or better, because it checks Raydium and every other DEX. To add liquidity, launch a token or trade gated stock tokens, you go to Raydium itself.

Raydium vs Pump.fun is mostly a launchpad choice. Pump.fun has its own audience and graduates tokens into PumpSwap. LaunchLab lets a launch platform set its own fees and quote token, which is why StonkFun built on it.

Creating a token without a launchpad. If you need an SPL token with metadata but no bonding curve, our Solana token creator tool handles that. Disclosure: Solana Compass runs it, and its fees go to our liquid staking token. You can then seed a CPMM pool on Raydium yourself.

Raydium history

Raydium went live in February 2021. It was an AMM that also placed orders on the Serum order book, and that design made it the hub of early Solana DeFi. Concentrated pools came next, then standard CPMM pools, then Perps and LaunchLab in 2025.

When Serum collapsed, the order-book link moved to OpenBook. Raydium cut it from AMM v4 in July 2026, ending the hybrid design it was known for. Since then Raydium has leaned into tokenized stocks and launchpad tools. Fee-funded RAY buybacks tie both back to the token.