Raydium (RAY)

Raydium (RAY) is the largest automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) by volume on Solana.

Primer

Raydium (RAY) is the largest automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) by volume on Solana. First launched in 2021, Raydium allows users to permissionlessly create new liquidity pools, provide liquidity to existing pools, launch tokens, swap tokens, and trade perpetual futures. Liquidity providers earn trading fees on each swap made in a pool as well as RAY, the protocol’s token, and/or other tokens if the pool is incentivized. RAY can also be staked to earn additional RAY tokens.

In May 2024, the Raydium V3 application launched alongside revamped Constant Product Market Maker (CPMM) pools that support the Token-2022 token program and include a built-in price oracle. In addition to CPMM pools and its legacy standard AMM pools (AMM V4), which offer uniform liquidity distribution, Raydium offers Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) pools that allow for liquidity concentration at specific price points. CLMM provides lower slippage for traders and higher fee earnings for LPs, though the risk of higher impermanent loss is magnified by this design. Trading and routing are also available via the Raydium API.

More recent developments include Raydium’s release of its perpetual futures trading platform, Raydium Perps, on Jan. 9, 2025, and its token launch platform, LaunchLab, on April 16, 2025.

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Key Metrics

Performance Analysis

Volume and Market Share

As the leading DEX by volume on Solana, Raydium’s trading volumes are a key indicator of the network's overall activity. In Q1 2025, daily average volume grew 12.7% QoQ to $3.6 billion, due to a record $195.8 billion in volume in January. Daily volume peaked at $16 billion on Jan. 19 following the launch of President Donald Trump’s memecoin, TRUMP, on Jan. 17.

Token prices and trading activity across the broader crypto market also peaked at this time. Thereafter, daily trading volume on Raydium declined sharply, with $709.6 million in volume at Q1 end on March 31. To further illuminate this trend, Raydium averaged a record $6.3 billion in daily volume in January compared to $1.1 billion in March, which is 66% below the $3.2 billion in daily volume Raydium averaged in Q4 2024.

Q1 was Raydium’s fourth straight quarter as the leader in Solana daily DEX volume at 46.9%, down from 56.0% in Q4. With this decline in Solana DEX volume share, Raydium failed to capture the majority of Solana’s DEX volume in Q1, a feat the protocol previously achieved in Q3 and Q4 2024.

Meteora overtook Orca as the second-largest Solana DEX by volume in Q1, due in large part to a number of high-profile token launches on the protocol, including Donald Trump’s TRUMP, Melania Trump’s MELANIA, and LIBRA. Meteora’s daily volume share peaked on Feb. 14 at 31.8% after the launch of LIBRA. Following LIBRA’s price collapse, evidence of insider access, and liquidity and market manipulation, Meteora Co-Founder Ben Chow resigned on Feb. 17 from his position at the protocol. From that day forward to quarter close, Meteora averaged 11.8% of Solana DEX volume share.

Volume share by token type is an important metric to understand which tokens are trending on Raydium. Year-over-year, meme volume share on Raydium increased from 14.3% in Q1 2024 to 20.0% in Q1 2025. However, Raydium’s meme volume share declined from 27.9% in Q4. All other token categories increased their volume share in Q1. Most notably, AI tokens continued to surge, with a 130% QoQ increase in volume share from 1.2% in Q4 to 2.9% in Q1.

The difference in volume share growth between narratively hot categories like AI, compared to all other token types, reinforces the commonly held view that attention drives trading activity in crypto, particularly on Solana. Outside of memes and AI, some notable tokens to first launch liquidity pools on Raydium in Q1 include Sonic’s SONIC, First Digital Labs’ FDUSD, Portal’s PORTAL, and APOLLO’s zBTC.

Raydium’s share of global DEX volume declined from 17.4% in Q4 to 15.1% in Q1, while PancakeSwap’s volume share