First look at Serum’s fast clearing and ridiculously low transaction fees 🚨 This article is 4 years old...
First look at Serum’s fast clearing and ridiculously low transaction fees
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Updated: Aug. 22, 2020 at 5:22 am UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
The long-awaited decentralized derivatives exchange Serum got its big reveal earlier this week, when Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX, demonstrated its testnet during an online panel. While the DEX won’t ship for another few weeks, the first look at the innovative, Solana-based platform showed that users will be looking at one-second latency and transaction fees less than 1/100th of a cent.
Decentralized derivatives exchange Serum is right around the corner
Less than two weeks since Serum was officially announced the public got a first look at the ambitious decentralized exchange.
The Serum Project is a collaboration between FTX, a growing decentralized trading platform, and Solana, an interoperable blockchain platform. FTX’s upcoming exchange will differ from the current DEX offer by offering users physically settled cross-chain contracts. The platform relies on Solana’s decentralized oracle and offers cross-chain support that enables smart contract settlement.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, provided valuable insights about the exchange during the latest FTX online panel, saying that the only centralized thing about Serum is its URL.
He revealed that the exchange will roll out for the public within the next few weeks, but that the system has been working seamlessly on the testnet. This is mostly due to the great collaboration between Solana and FTX, Bankman-Fried noted. The fact that Serum was able to be shipped in less than three weeks showed is a testament to the great work being done at Solana, he added.
One second clearings and $0.0001 transaction fees are just the beginning for Serum
Bankman-Fried demonstrated a working version of Serum during an FTX online panel that featured some of the most notable names in DeFi—Aave’s Stani Kulechov, Compound’s Robert Leshner, Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko, and Sino Global Capital’s Matthew Graham.
In a statement to CryptoSlate, Graham said that Sino Global Capital was extremely pleased with the recognition Serum has received. FTX, which is one of their portfolio companies, managed to tackle some of the biggest problems facing DeFi such as speed, decentralized orderbooks, and transaction costs.
According to Bankman-Fried, Serum’s matching engine will be completely on-chain, which means it won’t be held back by the automated market-making (AMM) problems most decentralized exchanges face.
This is what has the potential to make Serum the decentralized platform with the highest throughput—Bankman-Fried said that the platform can handle hundreds of orders per second per market. The demonstration showed that trades cleared with unprecedented speed—it takes one second for an order to be finished on the blockchain once accepted.
But, this isn’t the farthest Serum can go—the team behind Serum will push for more development that would enable a 400 ms latency, Bankman-Fried revealed during the panel.
When it comes to the cost of transactions, none of the orders that have been put on the testnet so far cost more than $0.0001—1/100th of a penny.
If Serum is able to transition its full functionality from the testnet to the mainnet, it could, as one YouTube commenter put it, “make Uniswap feel like using a fax machine.”
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Serum is a decentralized exchange (DEX) built on the Solana blockchain.
Solana
$258.319
Solana is a high-performance blockchain platform that utilizes a unique consensus algorithm called “Proof of History” to achieve fast transaction speeds and low fees.
FTX
FTX is a defunct cryptocurrency exchange, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, that was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried and Zixiao “Gary” Wang in May 2019.
Sam Bankman-Fried is the former CEO, and co-founder of defunct crypto exchange FTX and Alameda Research.