Serum Monthly Recap — May 2022

5 min readJun 1, 2022

It’s been another exciting month for Project Serum! May saw a deep dive into the Serum protocol on the Marginfi Podcast, Serum Surfers on OpenSea, an announcement of the winners from Hackathon 3.0 in Taiwan, and much more.

Read on for a rundown on everything that happened in May of 2022.

Project Serum Ecosystem Visualized

Serum is a key part of the Solana ecosystem, and we’re welcoming new projects to the space every day. This month, we welcomed a variety of projects to Serum, and updated the Project Serum ecosystem map to show all of the innovative projects composing with Serum.

OpenSea Lists Serum Surfers

Serum Surfers was listed on OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace.

This marks a major milestone, as Serum Surfers joins the world’s largest NFT marketplace. We’re excited to see how this listing will help us reach a wider audience and continue growing the Serum Surfers community.

Partnerships

Dune Analytics dashboard highlight

Serum has partnered with Dune analytics to gain great insights into how the ecosystem is growing. May saw 222,875 active users in the Serum ecosystem with over 118,000,000 transactions this month. As the Serum ecosystem continues to evolve, you can track our growth with the intuitive tools at Dune Analytics

Serum joins Alpha Venture DAO as an advisor

Serum has joined the advisory board of Alpha Venture DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization dedicated to shaping the future of Web3. As we transition into the next era of the internet, it’s important that we equip the next generation of innovators with the tools and resources they need to develop world-changing applications

Ratio Finance & Atrix partnering to grow USDr liquidity on Serum

Serum is partnering with Ratio Finance and Atrix to help grow the USDr liquidity pool on Serum. This partnership will help to increase the liquidity of USDr on Serum and make it more accessible to users around the world.

Starting on May 16th, users can now stake their USDr/USDC stable pair to earn SRM

Taiwan Hackathon

This month we announced the winners of the Serum Hackathon 3.0 which took place in Taiwan. Congratulations to 1st place winners To The Moon and runners up Mama M for building amazing applications on top of the Serum ecosystem.

To The Moon built an intuitive user interface and introduced innovative investment strategies with the winning project, while Mama M developed strategic trading bots to automate advanced trading on the platform. Both teams finished their projects within the allotted 30 hours and presented their innovations the next day.

We’re very grateful to host such an amazing community of developers, and look forward to seeing what these teams come up with next!

Serum’s latest development on Marginfi Podcast

On May 11th, Serum Core Contributor Michelle joined the Marginfi podcast to discuss the mechanics behind Project Serum and how it’s setting out to change the DeFi landscape.

During the conversation, Michelle discussed the Serum ecosystem, how it came to be, and what Serum’s vision is for the future of DeFi.

If you’re interested in learning more about what goes on behind the scenes at Project Serum, definitely check out this episode of Marginfi!

Governance

PsyFinance Grant passed

Back in April, the PsyFinance team petitioned the Serum community for a grant of 2,000,000 SRM in order to collaborate on a liquidity mining program for the project’s V2 Option Vaults, which run on Serum’s order books.

As Decentralized Option Vaults become increasingly popular within the Solana ecosystem, we’re happy to announce that PsyFinance’s grant petition passed, and they will be awarded 2,000,000 SRM to expand options trading within the Serum ecosystem.

Volume-based trading incentives passed

Earlier in May, the community approved a proposal to institute volume-based trading initiatives on the Project Serum DEX by a unanimous vote of 2,241,315 to none. Aimed at bringing more liquidity to the exchange, the new initiative will reward traders in proportion to the amount of volume they execute on the platform. We’re looking forward to seeing how volume-based incentives help grow the Serum ecosystem.

Voting Escrow (veSRM) passed

Also this month, the Serum community approved a proposal to institute voting escrow tokenomics to encourage participants to remain engaged with the protocol over the long term. Voting escrows, developed by Curve Finance, are an innovative tool to drive community engagement and encourage long term participation, where voters lock up governance tokens in exchange for voting power.