Serum, Raydium and Orca. How do they compare?

The Solana ecosystem is home to many DeFi applications.

These applications, leveraging Solana’s speed and scalability, bring us better financial solutions.

Three of such applications are Serum, Raydium, and Orca.

If you’ve ever wondered about the similarities & differences of Serum, Raydium & Orca, then here is a detailed breakdown of the three most popular DeFi Protocols on Solana Network for the Soldex community.

Serum is a protocol and ecosystem that brings unprecedented speed and low transaction costs to decentralized finance. It is built on Solana and is completely permissionless. Ecosystem partners can compose with Serum’s on-chain central limit orderbook to share liquidity and power markets-based features for institutional and retail users. More specifically, Serum’s on-chain central limit order book and matching engine provides liquidity and price-time-priority matching to traders and composing projects. Users benefit from this exchange model through the ability to choose the price, size and direction of their trades. Composing projects benefit from Serum’s existing architecture, bootstrapped liquidity, and matching service.

Serum provides a fully on-chain orderbook, allowing applications such as trading interfaces to ‘plug into’ Serum’s composable ecosystem.

Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) built on the Solana blockchain which leverages the central order book of the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX) to enable lightning-fast trades, shared liquidity and new features for earning yield.

Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) platform built on Solana where users can swap, trade and provide liquidity to earn yield on digital assets. However, unlike other AMM platforms, Raydium’s AMM provides on-chain liquidity to Serum’s central limit order book, meaning that Raydium’s users and liquidity pools have access to the order flow and liquidity of the entire Serum ecosystem, and vice versa.

Raydium’s Best Price Swaps feature determines whether swapping within a liquidity pool or through the Serum order book will provide the best price for users.

Orca is the place to exchange cryptocurrency on the Solana blockchain through automated market maker (AMM) exchange.

Orca uses the Solana team’s token-swap program. Orca’s Constant Product pools use a version that was audited by crypto security firm Kudelski. This deployment uses the commit hash: 3613cea3c.

Orca’s Stable curve pools use a more recent version which has not been through a formal audit. However, it has been reviewed by Orca and Solana’s engineers. The deployment uses the commit hash: 813aa3.

Conclusion

Serum is a core product of Solana ecosystem.

Serum itself stopped supporting its own GUI for DEX, but any other project can connect to the Serum’s order book. Raydium is one of them.

Orca doesn’t use Serum’s order book but uses the Solana team’s token-swap program. All three projects have their own SPL tokens More information about SRM, RAY and ORCA. There are yield farming and staking programs on Raydium and yield farming on Orca.