Raydium Makes a Bid for Solana's Multibillion Dollar Perpetuals Market

Decentralized crypto trading engine Raydium is making a bid for Solana's multibillion dollar perpetuals market – and gaining traction fast.

Decentralized crypto trading engine Raydium is making a bid for Solana's multibillion dollar perpetuals market – and gaining traction fast.

Raydium's weeks-old foray into offering these hyper-popular derivatives contracts – they allow crypto traders to speculate on price swings without holding the actual token – is already racking up $100 million in daily trading volume.

It's now Solana's third most popular venue for trading perps, behind Jupiter and Drift, this ecosystem's trading heavyweights. The growth comes despite Raydium perps' nascency; its builders haven't poured marketing capital on promoting a trading tool that's yet to officially launch.

"Raydium brand still packs a punch," said InfraRAY, a core contributor to the project.

The push caps Raydium's ascendence to the top of Solana's decentralized crypto trading landscape. Its automated market maker (AMM) setup, which enables anyone to spin up a trading pool of any asset, has been a difference-maker in Solana's memecoin era.

And yet, most traders who use Raydium's swap rails never visit its website. Instead, they access its services through trading aggregators that split orders across multiple venues. This means potentially less activity for Raydium and, crucially, a weaker relationship with direct users, the traders.

In industry parlance, these traders are the "takers," the ones who execute a trade. Makers, meanwhile, are the ones providing liquidity, perhaps by funneling assets into Raydium's AMM.

"Raydium has done well on the maker-side," said InfraRAY, "But greater network effects exist when you own the relationship with the taker."

Behind the scenes, Raydium's perps trading is being supported by Orderly Network, a trading project with roots outside the Solana ecosystem. Orderly allows perps traders working from multiple blockchains to trade assets on a unified order book. This provides smoother sailing for all orders.

Orderly's month-old Raydium rollout is proving to be a major boon. Perps traders on Solana are now driving 25 percent of Orderly's total volume.

"We're trading anywhere from $200 to $400 million a day in volumes" across the couple dozen projects that offer Orderly-supported perps trading, said CEO Ran Yi.

Facilitating trades via Orderly – in lieu of executing perps transactions on-chain, as many of Raydium's more entrenched competitors do – can save the protocol money and better ensure transactions process correctly, InfraRAY said. But it also comes with its own cross-chain complexities that he said are still being worked through.

Next stop: full launch. In a few weeks Raydium's perps service will be ready for a proper debut and shake off the "public beta" training wheels. Once it does, the teams behind it plan to push harder on marketing and outreach.

Even at $100 million in daily volumes, Raydium's perps service is far from displacing the Solana DeFi ecosystem's top on-chain perps service, Jupiter. The best-known swaps aggregator's derivatives exchange sees nearly $2 billion in daily volume; the runner-up, Drift, sees double the volume of Raydium.

But InfraRAY is confident Raydium can chip away at the bigger protocols' respective leads. For one, its perps service offers trading in vastly more assets than either competitor. Orderly allows for speedy listings of new contracts, meaning Raydium can move fast to capture, and potentially corner, new markets.

He thinks the total addressable market for Solana-based perps is only set to grow.

"I expect there to be more competition and innovation. But currently Raydium has a seat at the 'table."