Saros

Saros is a decentralized exchange and liquidity infrastructure protocol built on Solana, aiming to function as what its team calls the "Liquidity Layer" for the Internet Financial Market. It started in September 2021 as a product of Coin98 Labs and has since evolved from a straightforward automated market maker into a multi-component platform combining a classic AMM, a Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM), yield farming, and token staking.

The Problem Saros Addresses

Traditional financial markets suffer from fragmentation: each asset class operates in its own silo, behind intermediaries, with capital scattered across incompatible infrastructure. Early DeFi AMMs brought permissionless, always-on liquidity to crypto, but conventional constant-product AMMs spread capital uniformly across all price ranges, making them capital-inefficient. A large share of deposited funds sits idle at prices far from the current market rate, translating into higher slippage and thinner order depth for active trading pairs.

New projects launching tokens face a compounding version of this problem: bootstrapping deep liquidity requires either significant capital commitments or expensive incentive programs, which many teams cannot afford early on.

How Saros Works

Classic AMM

The original SarosSwap is a constant-product AMM where liquidity providers deposit token pairs into shared pools. Any SPL token can be listed and traded immediately without any approval process. Liquidity providers earn trading fees proportional to their share of the pool, and separate SarosFarm integrations allow LP tokens to be staked for additional $SAROS rewards.

Saros DLMM

In May 2025, Saros launched its DLMM, developed in collaboration with LFJ (formerly Trader Joe on Avalanche), the original creators of the Liquidity Book architecture. Rather than spreading liquidity uniformly, DLMM concentrates capital across discrete price "bins" — small, contiguous price ranges. Liquidity providers choose which bins to fill, enabling tight concentration around the active market price where trades actually execute. Key characteristics:

• Discrete price bins: Liquidity is partitioned into fixed-width price increments, with each bin functioning as a micro-constant-product pool. Only the bin containing the current market price is active for any given trade.
• Dynamic fees: Fees adjust based on market volatility and bin step size, allowing LPs to earn more during high-volatility periods when impermanent-loss risk rises.
• Concentrated Incentives (CI): Introduced in December 2025, this mechanism streams real-time rewards only to LPs providing liquidity at or near the active market price, aligning incentives toward depth where it is most useful.
• Composability: Liquidity at the protocol level can be routed, abstracted, and integrated into lending protocols, derivatives platforms, stablecoin systems, and other DeFi applications.
• Instant pool creation: Any token pair can go live without listing reviews, integration bottlenecks, or pre-approval from a governing body.

As of late 2025, the platform reported approximately $23.8 million in total value locked and over $926 million in cumulative all-time trading volume.

Supported Tokens and Assets

Saros supports any SPL token on Solana. Its growing pool catalog spans stablecoins (USDC, USDT, USDS), BTC-linked assets such as Bedrock's uniBTC, Solana ecosystem tokens, and real-world asset (RWA) instruments. The platform has also expanded its Liquidity Grant Program to accommodate multichain tokens bridging onto Solana from other networks, making Saros a natural landing point for cross-chain projects seeking Solana liquidity.

Ecosystem Programs

$10 Million Liquidity Grant Program: Announced in October 2025, Saros deploys $SAROS from its own treasury alongside a project's tokens to seed deep liquidity pools at no direct capital cost to the recipient project. The rationale is that Solana's aggregator-dominated swap routing means volume gravitates toward the deepest pools, so a well-seeded Saros pool benefits both a new project and $SAROS holders through organic arbitrage activity.

Token Buyback Program: Announced in August 2025, Saros allocates up to 20% of quarterly protocol revenue to buy back $SAROS tokens from the open market. By that point the team reported having already repurchased over 100 million $SAROS tokens, equivalent to approximately $38 million at then-prevailing prices. Annual transparency reports will disclose buyback totals.

$SAROS Token

$SAROS is the native protocol token. It is used for farm reward distributions, staking within the Saros Garden (SarosStake V2), and future governance. Tokenomics were revised in June 2025 to extend the investor and contributor vesting cliff by one year to January 2026, a move the team framed as prioritizing ecosystem stability over short-term unlock pressure.

Team and Background

Saros originated inside Coin98 Labs, the Vietnamese team behind the Coin98 multi-chain wallet. The project launched on December 28, 2021, with Coin98 Finance as its parent entity. In January 2024, Saros raised $3.75 million in a private financing round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Hashed, Spartan Group, GBV Capital, Genblock Capital, K300 Ventures, Cryptomind, and Evernew Capital — a set of backers spanning leading Asian and global crypto-native funds. The company's CEO is Lynn Nguyen (@lynnwwins), who has been publicly active in articulating the Internet Financial Market thesis around RWAs, stablecoins, and BTC-Fi on Solana.

Security and Audits

The Saros DLMM is built on Liquidity Book, the architecture originally designed by LFJ (Trader Joe), whose implementation has been live on Avalanche since 2022 and audited independently over multiple versions. Saros's implementation was developed in direct collaboration with LFJ's technical team. No separate Saros-specific audit report has been published in the team's public communications reviewed for this profile.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Saros positions itself as core infrastructure rather than a single application. Its permissionless pool creation and composable liquidity are designed for builders who need a reliable liquidity layer to route trades from Solana's Jupiter and other aggregators. Partnerships with Metaplex Genesis (for token launches), Bedrock (BTC liquid restaking), and BitFi (BTC asset management) reflect a deliberate effort to serve as the default liquidity venue for emerging asset categories arriving on Solana, including BTCFi and RWAs.