Saros

Saros is a Solana-native DeFi super-app and liquidity infrastructure protocol that combines a spot DEX, perpetual futures market, yield farming, and a token launchpad into a single platform. Founded in 2021 by Coin98 Labs -- a Vietnam-based blockchain company that also operates the Ninety Eight ecosystem -- Saros has positioned itself as "Solana's Liquidity Layer," aiming to serve as foundational infrastructure for what it calls Solana's "Internet Capital Markets."

Core Mechanism: Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker

The technical backbone of Saros is its DLMM (Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker), which entered its third major iteration (DLMM v3) in April 2025. Rather than spreading liquidity uniformly along a price curve in the way traditional AMMs do, the DLMM uses Liquidity Book technology: liquidity is deployed into discrete price "bins," each representing a narrow price range. Trades that fall entirely within a single bin execute at zero slippage, since the bin's effective price is fixed across its range. When volatility pushes trades across multiple bins, the protocol applies dynamic fees that rise in proportion to market conditions -- compensating liquidity providers (LPs) for the increased risk while discouraging exploitative arbitrage during high-volatility windows.

This design enables deeper markets with less capital than traditional constant-product AMMs. The protocol automatically rebalances active bins toward the current market price, preserving market depth under stress without requiring LP manual intervention. In December 2025, Saros added Concentrated Incentives, a feature that streams real-time token rewards directly to LPs in active price bins rather than distributing them uniformly across all positions -- meaning providers who track the market more closely earn proportionally higher yields.

Products and Features

SarosSwap is the flagship spot DEX. It allows any SPL token to be listed without permissioned gatekeeping, and routes through the DLMM engine for execution. The protocol also integrates with external DEX aggregators including OKX Swap for order routing.

Saros Perps brings perpetual futures to the platform via integration with Orderly Network's Central Limit Order Book (CLOB). The perps product supports over 100 listed trading pairs with leverage up to 50x. Orderly's three-layer architecture -- asset layer, engine layer, settlement layer -- provides centralized exchange-level execution quality while keeping custody non-custodial and on-chain.

SarosFarm provides incentivized liquidity pools for token projects seeking to bootstrap liquidity depth. This product is closely tied to Saros's broader ecosystem strategy: projects that receive liquidity grants (see below) typically deploy them through SarosFarm pools.

SarosStake allows SAROS token holders to stake their tokens for auto-compounding rewards and discounted trading fees (0.05% versus the default 0.15% for unstaked users).

Saros Garden is the platform's point-based loyalty program. Participants stake SAROS for BERRY points -- a non-transferable incentive mechanism. Longer lockup periods yield more BERRY; early unstaking forfeits a substantial share of accumulated points. BERRY grants priority access to token presales, project airdrops, and launchpad participation on the platform.

SarosID provides a unified identity layer enabling single sign-on across all Saros products with a single wallet connection.

A DEX Aggregator and an NFT Hub with AI-assisted minting round out the current product set.

Liquidity Grant Program

In October 2025, Saros launched a 10 million USD Liquidity Grant Program designed to fund zero-cost liquidity pools for projects building on or bridging to Solana. The program covers LP costs for selected projects, removing the upfront capital requirement that often prevents early-stage protocols from establishing viable markets. In November 2025, the program expanded to support multichain tokens bridging to Solana via cross-chain infrastructure. A 1 million USD sub-pool was announced in partnership with Metaplex. Initial program partners included BONK and PORTALS.

Supported Tokens and Asset Categories

Saros supports any SPL token pair through permissionless pool creation. Recent integrations have broadened the asset mix considerably: USDS (a Sky Protocol stablecoin) launched on the platform in September 2025, and Bedrock brought Bitcoin liquid restaking tokens to Saros the same month. BitFi added Bitcoin asset management capabilities in August 2025. The platform's stated target markets include spot trading, stablecoin infrastructure, real-world assets, forex, and derivatives -- reflecting an ambition to serve as a broad settlement layer rather than a narrowly focused DEX.

Team and Background

Saros was founded under Coin98 Labs, the same team behind the Coin98 Super Wallet, which reports more than 10 million global users with roughly half concentrated in Southeast Asia. Coin98 Labs operates as part of the Ninety Eight ecosystem, a Web3 incubator and investment vehicle based in Vietnam. The founders' regional context informs Saros's strategic emphasis on Southeast Asian markets, where countries like the Philippines (23.4% crypto adoption), Thailand (21.9%), and Indonesia (20.1%) have among the world's highest cryptocurrency usage rates.

Funding and Investors

In January 2024, Saros raised 3.75 million USD in a private funding round from Solana Ventures, Hashed, and Spartan Capital. The Solana Foundation has also provided strategic support. These backers are significant within the Solana ecosystem, with Solana Ventures and Hashed both having early stakes in multiple top Solana protocols.

Tokenomics

SAROS is the native governance and utility token with a maximum supply of 10 billion, of which approximately 2.625 billion were in circulation as of mid-2025. Token holders gain governance voting rights and access to reduced trading fees when staked. The protocol runs a deflationary model in which a portion of trading fees are burned. In June 2025, Saros announced a cliff extension by one year to January 2026 for investor and contributor allocations, citing ecosystem stability over short-term token velocity.

In August 2025, the Saros Foundation launched a SAROS buyback program allocating up to 20% of quarterly protocol revenues to open-market repurchases. As of reporting by Xangle, approximately 100 million SAROS tokens (valued at roughly 38 million USD at the time) had been repurchased and either burned or re-staked.

Security

Saros has been audited by multiple firms, though the platform has not publicly linked specific audit reports on its main documentation pages -- a transparency gap noted by independent reviewers. Prospective LPs and traders should request current audit documentation directly from the project.

Ecosystem Positioning

Saros competes directly with Raydium, Meteora, and Orca in the Solana spot DEX market, and with Drift Protocol and Zeta Markets in perpetuals. Its differentiation centers on the DLMM engine's capital efficiency, the Saros Perps product's CEX-grade execution, and the liquidity grant program's ability to attract net-new projects to the platform. The protocol's integration with Orderly Network, Wormhole, and multiple data aggregators (CoinGecko, DefiLlama, Birdeye) has embedded it into the standard Solana DeFi infrastructure stack.