THE BEST DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGES ON SOLANAWHAT IS SOLANA? Solana is a blockchain platform that has caught much of the crypto world’s attention after it rose by more than 1000% this year. It has been described as an ‘Ethereum killer’ as it aims to solve some of the Ethereum blockchain’s problems regarding transaction speed, costs, and scalability issues.
Founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, built by developers at San Francisco-based Solana Labs and maintained by the Geneva-based Solana foundation; Solana is currently the 7th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of over 40 Billion Dollars. At the time of writing, the Solana ecosystem contains 368 platforms, with decentralized exchanges taking up a large chunk.
WHAT ARE DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGES? Decentralized exchanges(DEXes), as the name implies, are cryptocurrency exchanges that allow users to transact crypto without a need for an intermediary or custodian. They differ from centralized exchanges(CEXes) in the sense that centralized exchanges act as custodians of your funds as you trade with them, whereas DEXes do not store your funds.
Decentralized finance exploded in popularity in early 2020, with DEX platforms like Uniswap and Sushiswap leading the way. Most of these DEXes make use of an automated market maker(AMM), which has no need for order books and executes trades automatically using liquidity from a liquidity pool.
BEST SOLANA DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGES RAYDIUM: Raydium exchange is an automated market maker(AMM) on the Solana platform that draws liquidity from two sources: its own liquidity pools and the order book of Serum, another decentralized exchange on Solana. Its governance token is called RAY and is ranked 110th by market cap, with a market cap of $670 Million+ at the time of writing.
Through innovative platforms like AcceleRaytor and DropZone, Raydium seeks to act as a bridge to introduce new and existing DeFi projects into the Solana ecosystem and maintain a leadership position among them.
SERUM: With a Total Value Locked of $565.91 Million, the Serum exchange is the most significant member of the Solana ecosystem. The foundation was created in July 2020 by FTX and Alameda Research. It is the Mother hen that backs up a number of synergistic products like Bonfida, Oxygen, and Raydium. Its community token, SRM, is ranked 92nd with a market cap of $970,892,505 at the time of writing.
The Serum exchange differs from other decentralized exchanges in the sense that it uses a central limit order book(CLOB) instead of an automated market maker(AMM). This allows users more flexibility with pricing and order sizes.
SOLANADEX: SolanaDEX is a decentralized exchange on the Solana ecosystem that describes itself as the home of the new MTC Token. Its trade page offers support for five trading pairs involving MTC(its native token), SOL, USDT, USDC, and WAYNE.
LUNADEX: LunaDEX is a decentralized exchange that combines the high speed and low cost of transactions on the Solana blockchain with the central limit order book of Serum. It has a user-friendly UI/UX where you can choose between simple or professional modes to swap or trade.
On December 12, 2020, LunaDEX announced an interesting partnership with Band Protocol to introduce another element of uniqueness to the Solana ecosystem. With this partnership, LunaDEX ensures the best prices as prices are cross-verified with up to 12 credible data sources in a decentralized manner.
SOLDEX: SolDEX is a state-of-the-art protocol that runs on the Solana chain and harnesses artificial intelligence to improve the user trading experience. It is innovative in the sense that it makes use of crypto trading bots to perform data analysis, predict market risk, and trade an asset.
Its native token, SOLX, is designed to be used for protocol governance, transaction fees, AI Bots feeding, and staking. The protocol also consists of an academy called SolDEX academy, which aims to help beginners to become familiar with Solana and DeFi as a whole. The foundation is presently conducting private sales of its token on its website: Soldex.AI.
ORCA: Orca is a decentralized exchange on the Solana platform that describes itself as an exchange for people and not for programs. Thus, the Orca team does their best to make trading on the platform as simple as possible. It is a fully audited platform that allows users to swap tokens, add liquidity to liquidity pools, and engage in yield farming.
The ORCA token is used for utility and governance on the platform. It has a maximum supply of 100,000,000 coins and a fully diluted market cap above one billion dollars. At the time of writing, the coin traded for $15.64 on the various crypto exchanges.
CONCLUSION Solana is one of the hottest coins in the crypto world right now. Its low latency, low cost, and high-speed transactions have made it a hub for developers and investors alike. However, it may be too late to buy the Solana coin for investment purposes because of the giant strides it has already made(That’s this writer’s opinion and not financial advice).
What you can do is invest in applications and exchanges on the platforms, and you may end up getting one with high returns. I hope this article can help you decide which ones are best for you.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS IS SOLANA A DEFI COIN? Yes, Solana is a decentralized blockchain on which DeFi applications and exchanges can be built.
WHAT IS THE SOLANA ECOSYSTEM? The Solana ecosystem is a network of applications, exchanges, and other platforms that leverage the peculiar features of the Solana blockchain for DeFi purposes. Ever since Solana came into the spotlight, its ecosystem has been expanding exponentially and has come to include 368 individual components.
WHAT ARE PROJECTS BUILDING ON SOLANA? Some of the top projects on Solana at the moment are Raydium, Serum, Orca, Hedgehog Markets, the Media network, Solfarm, Solpad, etc. There are also other promising projects yet to launch on Solana, like Solrazr finance(which claims to be the first decentralized developer ecosystem on Solana) and Genopets(an NFT RPG soon to launch on Solana), among others.
