Raydium

Raydium is Solana's oldest and most battle-tested decentralized exchange, launched in February 2021 as the network's first automated market maker. What began as a single constant-product pool has evolved into a multi-product liquidity infrastructure layer supporting token swaps, concentrated liquidity positions, permissionless token launches, and leveraged perpetual futures — all within a self-custodial interface. Raydium operates as a central routing destination for the broader Solana DeFi ecosystem, with Jupiter and other aggregators directing substantial order flow through its pools.

How Raydium Works

Raydium runs four distinct pool programs simultaneously, letting liquidity providers choose structures that match their risk tolerance and activity level.

CLMM (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) pools let providers specify price ranges within which their capital is active. Capital earns fees only while the market price falls inside the chosen range, making positions significantly more capital-efficient than traditional constant-product pools, at the cost of requiring active range management. Positions are issued as non-fungible tokens tracking individual price bands. Eight fee tiers from 0.01% to 2% accommodate everything from stablecoin pairs to highly volatile new tokens.

CPMM (Constant Product Market Maker) pools are the default for new token pairs. They issue fungible LP tokens, support the Token-2022 standard, and are designed for passive liquidity providers who prefer set-and-forget deployment. These pools serve as the primary landing destination for tokens graduating from the LaunchLab bonding curve.

AMM v4 is Raydium's original 2021 program. It originally integrated with the OpenBook on-chain order book to allow limit orders alongside AMM liquidity. A July 2026 update removed this dependency, simplifying the architecture while preserving the large volume of legacy pairs accumulated over five years. The program retains approximately $300 million in older token pairs.

Stable AMM uses a lookup-table pricing curve designed for correlated assets — primarily stablecoin pairs — where constant-product formulas would introduce unnecessary slippage.

All modern pool types share the same fee distribution structure: 84% of trading fees go to liquidity providers, 12% flow into RAY token buybacks via open-market purchases, and 4% accumulate in the protocol treasury.

LaunchLab

In April 2025, Raydium launched LaunchLab, a permissionless token creation platform. The move followed the breakdown of Raydium's integration partnership with Pump.fun, which had launched its own AMM (PumpSwap) to capture the trading volume from tokens it incubated. LaunchLab implements bonding curves — linear, exponential, or logarithmic — where buyers receive tokens at prices derived from the amount of supply already sold. Once the curve reaches its funding target, graduation occurs automatically: the program deploys a CPMM liquidity pool, snapshots the bonding-curve reserves into it, and revokes mint authority.

Creators earn through two channels: a configurable share of the flat 1% bonding-curve trading fee, and a Fee Key NFT minted at graduation that entitles the holder to 10% of the graduated pool's trading fees indefinitely. Third-party platforms can integrate LaunchLab infrastructure under their own branding and fee structures, turning Raydium into a white-label launchpad layer for the broader ecosystem. Graduation rates remain below 1%, meaning most launches never reach a CPMM pool — a figure creators should weigh against launch costs.

LaunchLab contributed $12.8 million in revenue in Q3 2025, a 220% quarter-over-quarter increase that represented more than half of Raydium's total $24.3 million in protocol revenue that quarter. Raydium processed $51.9 billion in trading volume in Q3 2025, a 31% quarterly increase, capturing approximately 15.9% of the broader Solana DEX market.

Raydium Perps

Launched in January 2025, Raydium Perps integrates perpetual futures trading powered by Orderly Network's gasless central limit order book. Traders access leverage up to 100x across more than 97 trading pairs under a cross-margin model. Unlike AMM-based perpetuals, order placement and cancellation carry no on-chain fees — only deposits and withdrawals require on-chain transactions. Accepted collateral includes USDC, SOL, USDT, ETH, BNB, WBTC, and several stablecoins. U.S. residents and users in certain sanctioned jurisdictions cannot access the product.

Tokenized Assets

Raydium hosts the primary spot markets for Solana's tokenized equities — xStocks such as TSLAx, NVDAx, and SPYx. Tokenized asset trading on Raydium generated $5.77 billion in spot volume in Q2 2026. In July 2026, Raydium introduced permissioned pools, enabling token issuers to gate liquidity pool access at the program level for regulatory compliance. This allows compliant institutional instruments and open memecoin markets to coexist within the same protocol.

RAY Token

RAY has a fixed maximum supply of 555 million tokens with mint authority permanently disabled. Approximately 270 million tokens circulate at present. The primary on-chain demand driver is the fee-to-buyback mechanism: 12% of all pool trading fees are spent purchasing RAY from the open market, creating a direct, auditable link between protocol activity and token demand. In Q2 2025, buybacks deployed $10.7 million in USDC to repurchase 4.3 million RAY from the open market.

RAY holders can stake tokens to earn additional RAY from the mining reserve, which holds 188.7 million tokens (34% of total supply) earmarked for liquidity incentives at approximately 1.9 million tokens emitted annually. Staking yields run around 5% APR with no impermanent loss exposure. RAY was listed on Coinbase on January 14, 2026.

The token allocation breakdown: 34% to the mining reserve for liquidity incentives, 30% to partnership and ecosystem, 20% to the team (unlocked linearly through February 2024), 8% to initial liquidity, 6% to community and seed investors, and 2% to advisors.

Security

Raydium's on-chain programs have been audited by Kudelski, OtterSec, MadShield, Halborn, and Sec3. An Immunefi bug bounty program pays up to $505,000 per critical finding, with roughly $3.4 million distributed to date. Program upgrades are governed through a Squads multisig with a 24-hour timelock, added in April 2026.

Two incidents merit attention. In December 2022, a private key compromise — not a smart contract exploit — resulted in $4.4 million in losses. In June 2026, validation gaps in retired AMM V3 pools were exploited for $1.34 million; Raydium reimbursed affected users from treasury funds.

Solana Ecosystem Position

Raydium functions as Solana's central liquidity hub. Jupiter, the leading Solana swap aggregator, routes a significant share of order flow through Raydium's pools given their depth relative to alternatives. The combination of CLMM pools for deep concentrated liquidity, CPMM pools for new-token bootstrapping, LaunchLab for permissionless token creation, and the fee-to-RAY-buyback loop makes Raydium one of the most deeply integrated protocols in the Solana DeFi stack — and the go-to venue for projects seeking immediate access to on-chain liquidity at launch.