FTX to Launch 'Scalable' Decentralized Exchange in Weeks

Building on the Solana blockchain means the new platform's operations are less restricted than those on Ethereum, the firm says.

Jul 27, 2020 at 11:30 a.m. UTC

Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 9:36 a.m. UTC

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.

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