In brief
- Serum is a decentralized exchange and liquidity provider protocol on Solana.
- Aleph.im says its Serum Markets data product will provide new insights into the protocol.
Solana's decentralized finance ecosystem isn't yet as mature as Ethereum's. But it's getting there.
And a new product for self-described "liquidity infrastructure ecosystem" Serum promises to unlock a treasure trove of data on the up-and-coming Solana network, which is competing with Ethereum on speed and cost.
Aleph.im, a DeFi architecture software firm, announced today the release of Serum Markets, which will allow users of the 15+ DeFi projects integrated with Serum—from lending protocols to the decentralized exchanges that remove financial intermediaries from the equation—to view trading data that it says has mostly been absent or hard to access.
"Until now, trading data from Serum’s ecosystem has been noticeably difficult to consolidate," wrote Aleph.im in a press release. It says its solution lets users access DeFi trading data such as the total value of assets locked into protocols, daily active users, and open orders.
Though Aleph.im is already used on decentralized orderbook Raydium and other Solana DeFi protocols, the latest integration is noteworthy given that over a dozen Solana protocols use Serum to ensure they have the necessary liquidity to continue operating.
"It is not the first but the most comprehensive, decentralized and ready-to-use resource available now, that surfaces a lot more than current solutions (i.e. DeFi Llama, DApp Radar or even Solana-based Dexes who only track TVL)," Aleph.im founder Schemoul told Decrypt via email.
If you haven't heard of it, Serum is part decentralized exchange, part jack of all trades on Solana. The Serum protocol uses governance tokens and a decentralized orderbook and then adds in cross-chain asset swaps to make it interoperable with Ethereum, where the bulk of decentralized finance applications still live. It's currently jostling for second on Solana's rankings of total value locked, a measure of how much money DeFi users have poured into the platform, with just over $1.7 billion. That would place it in the top-20 of DeFi protocols on Ethereum, according to data from DeFi Llama.
Schemoul thinks the time is right for Solana's growing set of DeFi users to peek under the hood as his own platform tries to be Solana's equivalent of a Dune Analytics or Glassnode. “We’re thrilled to extend our indexing solutions and analytics dashboards to Serum...to offer users, traders and institutional investors increased visibility into the Solana DeFi ecosystem.”
It's an ecosystem that is quickly gaining ground on Ethereum. Although Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem counts more than $170 billion in locked assets, TVL in Solana has doubled in less than two months to hit a record high above $14 billion this week. Both coins, meanwhile, are mooning, adding further fuel to their hot TVL numbers. Solana set a new record high on Wednesday, ascending past $240 for the first time.
Soon, people will be able to see the effects on Serum.