Calling All Devs — Serum, SRM, and an Ecosystem for the Future — Part 3
TL;DR: There are a myriad of ways for developers to get involved in the Serum ecosystem.
You can set up your own state-of-the-art DEX based on Serum. You can embed the Serum Swap feature that routes to the order book. You can utilize Serum as the liquidity layer and matching engine for your protocol’s trading features, and allow your team to focus on other important tasks!
There are many resources to help you get started. Join our communities to learn more.
We are passionate about supporting projects which can benefit from our on-chain matching engine and shared liquidity base. Hackathons, popular project ideas, and grant applications are just some of the ways for developers to achieve their DeFi ambitions.
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What’s up next
1. — A Serum for the future. A Serum for everyone.
2. — Get involved!
2.1 — Hosting a DEX GUI
2.2 — Serum Swapper
2.3 — Deeper Integrations
3. — Hackathon
4. — Project Ideas
5. — EcoSerum Grants
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A Serum for the future. A Serum for everyone.
Serum is a high-performant decentralized exchange with a fully on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) and matching engine which powers an entire ecosystem of DeFi services through composability.
An on-chain order book is the ‘holy grail’ for traders and developers seeking the global adoption of DeFi. Almost all electronic ‘tradfi’ exchanges use a limit order book.
Serum’s goal is to (1) become the matching and liquidity infrastructure layer of Solana, and (2) bring DeFi to the masses through the ambitious and symbolic goals of onboarding 1 billion users and $10T in value onto the ecosystem.
Solana ecosystem projects can compose with Serum’s CLOB to tap into the shared liquidity: Serum’s matching engine can take an order from one dApp composing with a Serum order book market and match it with an order from a completely different, composing dApp. This is how Serum powers a wide range of markets-based use cases for institutional and retail users, all at the speeds and low costs of a centralized exchange, while keeping everything decentralized.
The SRM token powers the Serum ecosystem. In terms of utility, holding SRM makes users eligible for lower fees across DEX GUIs and dApps that compose with the CLOB. Volume across these protocols go towards SRM buy and burn.
SRM will also be used for voting in Serum’s upcoming governance structure. More announcements about Serum’s move towards its envisioned DAO are on their way.
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Get Involved!
We are proud of what Serum has accomplished and made possible. There’s a myriad of ways for developers to get involved and build on Serum.
Here are some of the most common ways for Serum builders to deliver the next generation of DeFi services.
Hosting a DEX
One cool way for developers to get involved (ever since day one!) is hosting their own DEX graphical user interface (GUI).
Anyone can host their own DEX GUI and earn a portion of fees. The look, feel, and features built on top of your GUI are completely up to you.
That’s all it takes to launch a fast, cheap, and convenient DEX on Solana. No need to reinvent the wheel, build another on-chain matching engine, make market making partnerships, and build a GUI from scratch…
There are dozens of such full-featured Serum DEX GUIs. Check out Raydium, Bonfida, Mango, Dexlab, and OpenSerum, just to name a very small handful.
Volume from these GUIs, of course, go to the same central limit order book, meaning generated fees go to SRM buy and burn.
In other words, there is more than just one place to access Serum DEX. Serum makes it possible for anyone to set up their own state-of-the-art DEX. This is great news for traders, as it means more venues to pick from.
And this is just one way to participate in the Serum ecosystem. How else are developers getting involved?
Serum Swapper
Do you need a quick and sleek swap interface embedded on your protocol’s user interface? Grab the Swap program and the accompanying UI.
The swap program may be a slight misnomer: what the swapper actually does is send a market order to the Serum DEX to take advantage of Serum’s deep liquidity.
You may have used the swap program before! Much like Serum GUIs, they can be housed under different protocols, like Symmetry, Mercurial, Atrix, Cyclos, or Solflare, to name just a few. You can imagine the convenience this embedded feature can offer.
Deeper Integrations
Serum powers many kinds of use-cases and integrations can be deep and elegant.
Matching orders lies at the heart of Serum. Serum can match for not only spot markets but also derivatives (Zeta Markets, PsyOptions, off-piste, HXRO). Serum can also power liquidations (Jet Protocol, Solfarm, Parrot), asset management features (Solrise, Nova Finance), AMMs for deeper and smarter liquidity (Raydium, Atrix, Cyclos), and even in-game NFT markets (Star Atlas, DeFi Land, Aurory, OpenEra), to name just a few.
These are just some of the players building on Serum. We will do a deeper dive into our constantly growing ecosystem soon.
This growing list of ecosystem partners is exciting news for SRM holders. After all:
- Holding SRM makes users eligible for cheaper fees for trades matched via the Serum order book across Serum-based dApps and DEX GUIs.
- And more volume means more value accrual for SRM.
“In the spirit of DeFi, users are invited to compose with us and host their own GUIs…”
That’s Serum: a high-performant and diversely accessible DEX, a fully on-chain order book and matching engine, and a fully composable primitive powering a DeFi ecosystem for all.
What will you build on Serum?
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Hackathons
Hackathons are a great opportunity for upstart teams to shine.
Our partner, Solana, has outdone themselves with the sheer number of incredible hackathons this year.
As of writing, there is still a chance to partake in the Solana: IGNITION Hackathon until October 15. Serum is sponsoring its own track with a first place prize of $30K.
On a spookier note, the Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean is also a great place to get started in the Serum and Solana ecosystem. The Anchor community will be participating, and everyone is invited to join!
There will be countless opportunities after this one, of course, so stay tuned.
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Project Ideas
Need hackathon or project ideas? Serum has you covered.
You can check out our updated list of hot and highly demanded project ideas. Many of these ideas come with substantial grants, including the two below. Get in touch to learn more.
Two popular requests:
(1) Build a way to switch the Solana information model from polling to streaming, facilitating development of novel and more complex hybrid apps on Solana.
In terms of architecture, the way a Solana validator currently works is by using a rocksdb instance for fast storage of state, and periodically committing transaction history to a Google BigTable instance.
(2) Running Serum markets on testnet and stress test them to break them.
Tasks to be done for this are:
- Manage DEX upgrades
- List markets with tokens
- Provide a faucet (for those tokens) that anyone can use to get and trade on the testnet DEX
- Provide a GUI for testnet DEX
- Run cranks on testnet DEX
You can continue the conversation on our Discord.
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EcoSerum Grants
A longstanding principle of Serum is community-oriented support for promising projects and initiatives that benefit the ecosystem and community.
This principle continues to shape Serum’s governance and decentralization goals.
Do you have a novel idea and something to showcase? Entrepreneurial spirits are encouraged to apply for an EcoSerum grant.
In the past month alone, Serum has given out more than $10 million worth of grants. The standards will continue to become more rigorous, and this is indicative of a strengthening ecosystem meeting demand and developing increasingly sophisticated solutions. We are excited to see what’s next.
It’s your time to shine.
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Getting Started with Project Serum
Read Serum Roadmap 2.0
Read An Ultimate Vision for Project Serum
Read Building on Serum’s Vision
Check out Serum’s Developer Resources and Project Ideas
Listen to Sam Bankman-Fried’s breakdown of the Serum ecosystem
