Serum Monthly Recap — June 2022
Despite the June slowdown in the crypto markets, Project Serum is keeping busy and making waves this month.
Serum kicked off the month with the launch of a much-anticipated explainer series, which gives an overview of all the different aspects of Project Serum. This was followed by the launch of xNFT Backpack, which is designed to promote collaboration and innovation within the Serum community.
Alongside the launch of Saga, the new Solana-native smartphone, Solana has also launched the Solana Mobile Stack, a mobile toolkit that opens the doors for developers to create new and unique mobile dApps. Crypto will become more seamless than ever before on a device that’s tailored to its technology.
This month also saw the launch of Mayan Finance and a live conversation about the project and all things crosschain DeFi on Twitter Spaces.
Serum partnered with Pyth Network, Vybe, and Burnt Finance to launch new NFT collections in the all-new Serum NFT ecosystem and kicked off the Mega Hackathon in collaboration with Northwestern University this month, where teams of students from across the U.S. compete to build and innovate on the Serum platform.
For the developer community, Serum also introduced an exciting new developer tool, which is now live.
Finally, Project Serum hosted an NFT event with MonkeDAO in The Big Apple, where Solana Monkey Business NFT holders met for a fun night of dinner, drinks and discussion about the future of the Solana ecosystem.
All in all, it’s been another busy and productive month for Project Serum.
Mayan Finance Launch & Twitter Space Recap
Project Serum hosted the team from Mayan Finance for an AMA on Twitter Spaces. Mayan Finance is a cross-chain DeFi protocol that allows users to lend and borrow crypto assets in a secure and trustless manner.
During the AMA, the team from Mayan Finance talked about the project, their vision for the future of DeFi, and how they are working to promote cross-chain collaboration within the Serum ecosystem. They also answered questions from the Serum community about their project.
If you missed the AMA, you can listen to the full discussion here.
Mega Hackathon
This month, Project Serum sponsored the Mega Hackathon in partnership with Northwestern University. This is the largest student-held Blockchain Hackathon, with teams reigning from top-tier universities in the US. Teams from Northwestern, USC, UChicago, and many more have registered for the event.
With four unique tracks and $80,000 in bounties up for grabs, we’re excited to see what the next generation of blockchain developers are able to create.
The hackathon will be held from June 15 through July 8th, and Project Serum encourages everyone to follow along on Twitter to see what the teams are able to build!
On June 18th, the Mega Hackathon hosted a presentation from Sayantan, a developer from Project Serum, who gave a technical workshop introduction to Serum.
Additionally, on June 20th, we had the pleasure of hearing from Michelle, a core contributor to Serum and previous head of growth at Perpetual Protocol. She presented a non-technical overview on Project Serum and a clear perspective on the project’s development.
Project Serum Explainer Series
Project Serum has launched a new video series to help explain various aspects of crypto, finance, and educate those in our ecosystem on these topics.
To answer that question, check out the CLOB (Central Limit Order Book) explainer series, which gives an overview of all the different aspects of the Project Serum ecosystem.
The series covers topics such as the CLOB’s history, its features and benefits.
Episode one covers market liquidity and price discovery. It explains how both concepts rely on one another and how their relationship creates a healthy market for pricing assets.
Episode two defines the central limit order book (CLOB) and walks through a brief history of how it was developed and details why CLOB is important today to both traditional finance and crypto.
Episode three goes through the functionality behind CLOBs to understand how they work and gives an example to put the process into practice.
Episode four discusses other methodologies like request for quotation (RFQ) and automated market makers (AMM) that exchanges employ. It further highlights how CLOB is enabling the mass adoption of crypto around the world.
Ecosystem Project Launch
In order to expand our ecosystem, Coral has launched Backpack to enrich the lives of crypto natives on Solana.
Backpack is a next-generation crypto wallet that’s optimized for hosting the xNFT protocol. xNFTs are rich, dynamic representations of a community that integrates all the programming capabilities of software into NFTs.
This new innovation will bring more flexible and creative capabilities for developers to create new experiences for crypto users to interact with their tokens, NFTs, and other digital assets — all in one place.
NFT Ecosystem Launch
June saw the launch of Project Serum’s all new NFT Ecosystem with two projects, Pyth Alligators and Vybe’s Octopus NFT collections dropping earlier this month.
Pyth Network is a project dedicated to realizing the full potential of the DeFi space by delivering valuable financial data and analytics to blockchain projects. This is the first time Pyth has minted NFTs, and we’re excited to see what they do with them in the future.
Vybe Network is a social media platform that is powered by the Vybe Token. Vybe has minted a series of NFTs that will be used to reward users for their content and participation on the platform.
We’re excited to see what other projects launch within the Serum NFT ecosystem in the coming months!
Developer Tooling Suite
Project Serum is proud to host one of the most vibrant developer communities in the DeFi space. This month, we’re excited to announce the launch of a new suite of developer tools, serum-dev-tools, which is now live. We encourage all developers to check it out and give us feedback.
The suite includes an overview of all the different tools and resources that are available to developers who want to build on Project Serum, and comes with a new SDK, a CLI, and also Serum Explorer, which provides devs with more insights into the Serum DEX marketplace.
To learn how you can get started building on Serum DEX, check out Serum developer Sayantan Karmakar’s in-depth explainer here:
https://sayantanxyz.hashnode.dev/serum-dev-tools
We encourage all developers to check out the new site and make use of the resources that are available!
MonkeDAO NFT Event in NYC
On Wednesday, June 22nd, MonkeDAO, Solana Monkey Business, and Project Serum partnered up to host Monke Serum @ NFT.NYC. It was a great night out with new and old friends from across the Solana ecosystem connecting over dinner and drinks.
The event was open to all Solana Monkey Business NFT holders, and was a great opportunity to learn more about MonkeDAO and how they’re working to help power the growth of the Solana ecosystem.
For those who couldn’t make it out, check out these pics from the event:
What’s Next for Project Serum?
With the summer heating up, we’re looking forward to a busy few months ahead. We’re excited to continue growing the Project Serum ecosystem and welcoming new projects and developers to build on top of our platform.
As always, we encourage everyone to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord server to stay up-to-date on all the latest news and announcements. Thank you for your continued support!
