Project Serum Launches New Markets With Upgraded Features In The Next Of A Series Of Rapid Advancements

Decentralized exchange Project Serum has launched new upgrades including GUI referral rebates and Serum-balance-based fee discounts for users. The upgrades mark the next step in a series of rapid advancements planned for the protocol. 

Serum is billed as the world's first completely on-chain cryptocurrency ecosystem built on the Solana blockchain. The protocol is also permissionless, leaving decisions up to the communtiy through its governance token SRM.

Today's upgrades caused relatively little disruption, though they did require users to pull and redeploy markets. Project Serum notified users in a tweet that market makers were planning to keep liquidity up on old markets for several days so that nothing problematic would happen if people were late to redeploy. 

FTX CEO and one of the Project Serum developers Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) celebrated the upgraded Serum markets in a tweet, highlighting that the upgrades would bring faster and higher throughput along with SRM based fee discounts. 

While the upgrades to the platform today are relatively minor, they demonstrated the pace at which development is occuring. Over the past few weeks Serum has begun allowing users to auto-approve DEX transaction and Bonafida recently added market orders and new trades. The market upgrades also come one day after Project Serum witnessed its first day trading above $10 million in volume, just one week after recording its first day trading above $1 million in volume. 

PC: Bonafida

Project Serum is attempting to solve some of the issues in the DeFi space. The growth of decentralized exchanges has been largely propelled by automated market makers which eliminate the need for order books and custom price orders. The elimination of these traditional tools leave an asset's price to be determined by a smart contract looking at the relative share of assets in liquidity pools. Changing balances in the pools moves the prices of assets in those pools. The smart contracts necessary to keep up AMMs are complicated, leading to expensive fees on congested networks like Ethereum. 

Project Serum is in part attempting to tackle this problem by building a layer two solution on the faster Solana blockchain. The plan is that Serum will eventually integrate with Ethereum with interoperable ERC-20 tokens. The project's roadmap outlines three parts with the protocol currently being in phase two. By the end of the roadmap the development team promises borrowing, lending, yeild, various cross-chain bridges and AMMs. 

By Emily Mason

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