Raydium

Raydium launched on Solana in February 2021 and became the chain's first automated market maker with a hybrid AMM and Serum order-book design, using liquidity bootstrapping to win major pairs quickly.

In December 2022 a private key compromise cost about $4.4 million, and with FTX and Serum collapsing, Raydium moved to its own AMM and CLMM pools, cutting its dependence on Serum.

The 2024 meme cycle made Raydium the default liquidity venue for Pump.fun graduates, at times 80% of its daily volume; after PumpSwap launched on March 20, 2025, that flow fell to a 7-35% band.

In April 2025 Raydium launched its own pad, LaunchLab, which contributed $12.8 million and 53% of protocol revenue in Q3 before dropping 88% quarter-on-quarter as memecoin activity cooled.

On January 14, 2026 Raydium's RAY listed on Coinbase, and in July Raydium introduced permissioned pools for compliant assets; tokenized equities traded $5.77 billion in Q2, becoming a new revenue pillar.

Still, a validation gap in Raydium's retired AMM V3 pools was exploited for $1.34 million in June, a reminder that its reliable-rails positioning has to be paid for with continuous security work.

On September 5, 2026, StonkFun shifted all new token launches to Raydium's LaunchLab; Pine Analytics data shows Q3 spot volume of about $16.1 billion and protocol revenue of about $9.39 million.

Buyback and burn continue: the protocol uses about 12% of trading fees to buy back RAY daily on the open market and permanently burn it; cumulative buybacks exceeded 30% of circulating supply by end-August, a single-day buyback of $640,000 on September 8 set a record since February 2025, and Q3 buybacks totaled about $5.15 million.

Other progress: cumulative xStocks tokenized-equity volume topped $6 billion, a permissioned AMM launched in July, and the CPMM fee structure was adjusted in October. RAY rose from about $0.90 in early September to about $2.56 on October 7, though pump.fun's in-house AMM is diverting volume.

On September 5, 2026 StonkFun routed all new token deployments through Raydium's LaunchLab, cutting launch costs from 0.29 SOL to 0.03 SOL and setting off a surge in tokenised equity trading. Third-quarter trading fees reached $57.1 million, more than triple the prior quarter, even though adjusted volume rose only 17% to $16.1 billion; tokenised stock volume climbed from $1.77 billion to $4.14 billion and LaunchLab launches jumped from 5,420 in August to 156,294 in September. About $6.2 million went into buybacks during the quarter, with the buyback wallet receiving 4.58 million RAY, roughly 1.7% of circulating supply, and cumulative repurchases passing 30% of circulating supply in August. RAY rose about 90% in a week to an 11-month high of $2.01 before falling 23.7% to $1.82 by October 17. Raydium's share of Solana DEX volume went from 4.3% in July to 12.2% in September, with TVL at $1.34 billion, and from October 1 it began taking 5% of creator fees on standard CPMM pools. Future strategy and roadmap: turn LaunchLab from a memecoin tool into an issuance channel for tokenised equities and RWAs, using higher per-trade fees to fund buybacks, while reducing reliance on a single integration so that nearly 80% of a quarter's fees do not concentrate in one month again.

Raydium has moved the fight from who lists more memecoins to who quotes more assets: tokenised equities now supply about 45% of swap fees, so revenue spreads across issuers instead of one launch wave, and Q3 net revenue of $7.99 million, up 264% quarter on quarter, is the first leg of that curve. Routing 12% of fees into daily RAY purchases held in a protocol wallet ties cash flow to LaunchLab issuance and has built a $243 million treasury. Pump.fun's Custom Pairs now lets memecoins quote against tokenised stocks and still led September with 18.6% monthly share against Raydium's 12.2%; the weak point is fabricated volume, with one wallet once producing 22.7% of it, so market quality decides how long the flywheel turns.

AlphaRay, Co-founder and pseudonymous lead, began in commodity algorithmic trading, moved into crypto market making in 2017, assembled a trading engineering team in 2020 and founded Raydium in February 2021, owning overall strategy and operations.

XRay, Chief Technology Officer and dev team lead, has eight years in trading and low-latency systems architecture across traditional and crypto markets, has designed all of Raydium's systems since the 2021 mainnet and has driven several generations of core engine rebuilds.

GammaRay, Head of Marketing and Communications, previously ran corporate marketing at a leading data analytics and market research firm, has led Raydium's brand and communications since 2021 and helps shape direction.

Timon Peng, Co-founder and Senior Full-Stack Engineer, based in California, is the co-founder named in the official whitepaper and has built protocol front-end and back-end code since 2021.

Ben Ungvari, Chief Marketing Officer, based in Miami Beach, Florida, is the CMO listed in official filings and has run growth and marketing since 2024.

Raydium tiers fees by pool type: CLMM offers 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.25% and 1%; CPMM offers 0.01%, 0.25% and 1%; Standard AMM v4 is fixed at 0.25%.

Raydium applies splits to the trading fee: CLMM and CPMM allocate 84% to LPs, 12% to RAY buybacks and 4% to the treasury; AMM v4 allocates 88% to LPs and 12% to RAY buybacks; on a 0.25% pool, LPs receive 0.21% and buybacks 0.03%.