Adrena

Adrena is a community-owned perpetuals and spot decentralized exchange built on Solana, offering up to 100x leverage trading with zero price impact and full self-custody, and distributing 100% of protocol revenue to liquidity providers and governance token holders.

What Adrena Does

Launched with a founding date of March 2023 and targeting mainnet release in late 2024, Adrena operates as a pool-to-peer perpetuals exchange modeled on the GMX design but with several key modifications. Traders open long and short positions against a shared liquidity pool rather than against other traders, eliminating counterparty matching delays. Positions are settled in milliseconds using Solana's speed, and oracle prices serve as entry prices with no spread or slippage, meaning what users see is what they get.

Initial supported trading pairs include BTC, SOL, and BONK, with plans to expand into real-world assets—including forex pairs like EUR/USD, commodities like gold and oil, and equity indices like the S&P 500—through a partnership with Autonom, which provides specialized oracles with institutional-grade precision for traditional market data.

Fee Structure

Adrena charges no opening fee for positions. Closing fees stand at 0.16% of position size. Swap fees are variable between 0% and 2% depending on pool composition, and borrow fees accrue hourly at a rate of 0% to 0.008% based on asset utilization. There are no liquidation fees charged to traders—a meaningful differentiator from competing perp DEXs on Solana and elsewhere.

Two-Token Model: ALP and ADX

Adrena runs on a dual-token system:

ALP is the liquidity pool token. Liquidity providers deposit accepted assets and receive ALP, which represents a proportional stake in the multi-asset pool and entitles holders to 70% of all platform fee revenue. The pool's target allocation at launch is 45% JitoSOL, 30% USDC, 20% WBTC, and 5% BONK. Using JitoSOL instead of raw SOL allows the pool to earn additional staking yield on top of trading fee revenue. The ALP pool cap was expanded multiple times during its bootstrap phase—from $10 million to $20 million to $30 million—as liquidity was absorbed rapidly.

ADX is the governance token with a maximum supply of one billion tokens. ADX holders who stake receive 20% of all protocol fees in USDC. An additional 10% of protocol revenue is used by the DAO to buy back ADX on the open market, creating consistent buy-side demand regardless of market conditions. The remaining 70% goes to ALP holders, meaning 100% of revenue is distributed rather than retained by a founding team or treasury.

ADX token distribution includes allocations for seed investors (8.67%), team and shareholders (22.5%), treasury (18%), and community airdrop (12.8%). The team's tokens vest over 24 months, with a 3-month cliff beginning at the end of December 2024, aligning team incentives with long-term protocol growth.

Duration-locking either ALP or ADX provides multiplier bonuses on fee revenue and on ADX token emissions, incentivizing long-term participation over mercenary capital.

Governance and Decentralization

Unlike many DeFi protocols that launch with provisional team-controlled governance and promise decentralization later, Adrena implemented DAO governance at the smart contract level from day one. The codebase is fully open-source under the AdrenaFoundation GitHub organization. There are no admin keys or emergency pause functions controlled by a founding team—protocol parameters are subject to community vote.

The protocol is permissionless: users trade directly from their own wallets without creating an account or depositing to a custodial system, a meaningful distinction from many competing perp platforms that require onboarding flows resembling centralized exchanges.

Security

Adrena's smart contracts were audited by Ottersec prior to mainnet launch. A bug bounty program hosted on Immunefi offers up to $250,000 for critical vulnerability disclosures. Oracle infrastructure was upgraded in April 2025 to a pull-model powered by Chaos Labs, providing more dynamic and manipulation-resistant pricing.

Ecosystem Integrations

Adrena's liquidity pool structure creates natural integrations with other Solana protocols. JitoSOL, the liquid staking token from Jito, forms the largest pool allocation, meaning ALP holders benefit from Solana staking rewards passively. BONK's inclusion as both a pool asset and a tradeable market reflects Adrena's alignment with the broader Solana community, as BONK was distributed widely to Solana participants.

The protocol is designed for composability, with a grants program aimed at encouraging third-party integrators such as aggregators and portfolio dashboards to plug into Adrena's trading infrastructure.

Performance and Growth

A trading competition held from November to December 2024 drove significant early adoption, with new trader counts peaking at 249 in a single week compared to a prior average of 22. Cohort retention data showed a 26.7% decay rate, which independent analysts interpreted as meaningful user stickiness for a newly launched protocol. Among tracked perpetuals DEXs on Solana, Adrena placed consistently in a positive market-share-gaining bracket week-over-week during this period. The DAO began open-market ADX buybacks on December 21, 2024, accumulating approximately 1.3 million ADX tokens from protocol revenue.

RWA Expansion

As of 2026, Adrena is pursuing a strategic expansion into traditional-market derivatives, aiming to become a primary on-chain liquidity venue for leveraged exposure to real-world assets on Solana. This means traders would be able to take leveraged long or short positions on forex pairs, commodity prices, and equity indices using USDC or SOL as collateral—without leaving the Solana ecosystem. Autonom's oracle infrastructure is central to this roadmap, delivering the low-latency, high-fidelity price data required to make RWA perpetuals viable without exposing liquidity providers to excessive oracle risk.

This positions Adrena not merely as one of several competing Solana perp DEXs but as a potential bridge between on-chain DeFi capital and traditional financial markets.