History Serum is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and ecosystem built on Solana. It was created by Serum Foundation, a consortium of partners including FTX, Alameda Research, and the Solana Foundation. Serum's whitepaper was published in July 2020. According to this whitepaper, the project aims to solve several underlying weaknesses in pre-existing DEXs, such as lack of orderbooks in AMMs and inadequate cross-chain support. Serum selected Solana as its Layer-1 protocol since it provides faster and cheaper transactions compared to Ethereum. Solana's more efficient processing capabilities allowed Serum to feature a fully on-chain and programmatic matching engine.

Road Ahead With a familiar central-limit orderbook (CLOB) and strong backing from FTX, Serum has become a fast-growing DEX. FTX and Alameda Research have also contributed by supporting and backing synergistic products to complement Serum, such as Bonfida (a data analytics engine and GUI for Serum), Oxygen (a DeFi prime brokerage protocol), and Raydium (AMM that provides liquidity to Serum orderbooks).