Established derivatives player FTX is building an alternative exchange for the growing decentralized finance (DeFi) space on top of highly scalable chain Solana.
- Dubbed Serum, the initiative claims to offer a scalable and liquid decentralized exchange (DEX) for derivatives, solving some of the structural vulnerabilities and limitations in the existing DeFi space.
- Solana is said to be able to process 50,000 transactions per second, compared to Ethereum, which can currently handle 15.
- Being highly scalable means Serum can run an order book on-chain, improving the exchange's liquidity, according to the white paper.
- Serum will be fully interoperable with Ethereum so it can tap into the existing DeFi space, which saw its market cap break the $4 billion boundary over the weekend.
- The exchange will also offer a bitcoin proxy token, allowing users to trade the largest cryptocurrency's value on the Solana blockchain.
- Other projects like Kin, which started out on Ethereum, have looked at migrating over to Solana because of the better scaling potential.
- Since Saturday, the price of Solana's native "SOL" token has almost doubled from $0.99 to $1.90, according to CoinGecko.
- Parallel to Serum, FTX announced it had listed SOL on its centralized exchange.
- An FTX spokesperson told CoinDesk it'll be the users who decide the products traded on Serum.
- The spokesman added that Serum could go live sometime in the next couple of weeks.
See also: FTX Is Building Lots of Sophisticated Markets Few Traders Use