Raydium

Raydium is a set of smart contracts on Solana for swapping tokens and supplying liquidity, plus the raydium.io web app that sits on top of them. It does not hold user accounts. You connect a Solana wallet, trade against a pool, and the trade settles on-chain in about a second. Most Solana wallets and aggregators pull prices from Raydium pools. Raydium's docs say about 60% of the volume routed by Jupiter, Solana's main aggregator, ends up in Raydium pools, a figure the company does not date.

Raydium launched in February 2021. Its RAY token white paper, filed in July 2026 under the EU's MiCA rules, names the Raydium Foundation as the person seeking admission of RAY to trading, gives a registered address in George Town in the Cayman Islands, and lists Marc Piano and Bryce Howarth as directors. The disclaimer on raydium.io names the Raydium Holding Foundation as the party that makes the interface available. The two names may refer to related entities, and Raydium does not explain the difference. The team behind the original launch is not named in the documents we checked.

The white paper names Kraken's European entity, Payward Global Solutions Limited, as a trading platform for RAY under MiCA.

Every Raydium market is a pool of two tokens held by a program. The price moves as traders add one token and take out the other, and liquidity providers earn the swap fee in return for supplying both sides. Raydium runs several kinds of pool side by side:

• AMM v4: the original 2021 constant-product pool. It used to place orders on the OpenBook order book as well, but that link was removed in a July 2026 upgrade. It still holds many older pairs and does not accept Token-2022 tokens.
• CPMM (Standard AMM): the constant-product successor, live since 2024 and the default for new pools. It supports Token-2022 and creator fees.
• CLMM: concentrated liquidity, where providers choose a price range and earn fees only while the price stays inside it. It now also supports limit orders and dynamic fees.
• LaunchLab: new tokens trade on a bonding curve until a funding target is reached, then the liquidity moves into a Raydium pool automatically.
• Farms and staking: reward programs for LP tokens, and single-asset RAY staking.
• Raydium Perps: perpetual futures with up to 100x leverage at perps.raydium.io, matched off-chain by Orderly Network rather than by Raydium pools.

Developers often look up program IDs to check they are dealing with the real contracts. Raydium's reference page lists them and warns not to sign anything that calls a program ID that does not match.

A swap pays the pool's trading fee plus a Solana network fee, usually a fraction of a cent to a few cents in SOL. The pool fee depends on which program and fee tier the pool uses, and it is split between liquidity providers, RAY buybacks and the treasury.

Creating a pool costs about 0.30 SOL on AMM v4 and about 0.19 SOL on CPMM, including a 0.15 SOL creation fee. A CLMM pool has no creation fee, about 0.06 SOL of account rent. Tokens that use Token-2022 transfer fees add their own charge on the way in and out, which is why a swap can cost more than the headline 0.25%.

RAY is Raydium's SPL token, with a fixed maximum supply of 555 million and the mint authority disabled, so no more can be created. About 1.9 million RAY a year is still emitted from a mining reserve to farms and stakers. Team and seed tokens finished vesting on 21 February 2024.

You do not need RAY to swap, provide liquidity or use Raydium Perps. Its link to the business is the buyback: 12% of trading fees on every pool type is used to buy RAY, which is held at a public address the docs list. RAY can also be staked in the app for more RAY, and unstaking has no lock period described in the docs.

Anyone with a Solana wallet can reach the contracts, but the raydium.io disclaimer says the protocol is not available to residents of the United States, Belarus, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea, the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Zimbabwe. Raydium Perps adds Afghanistan to that list.

There is no sign-up or identity check on the spot app. Raydium Perps runs through Orderly Network's systems, which run the order book and matching for that product.

Raydium is non-custodial: tokens sit in program-owned vaults, and only the pool logic can move them. The real trust question is who can change that logic. According to Raydium's admin page, every program can be upgraded by a 3-of-4 Squads multisig, and a 3-of-5 treasury multisig can create fee tiers, change fees on existing pools and switch pools on or off. The CLMM limit-order keeper uses a single hot key on a server, though the docs say it can only settle orders to their owners. Raydium does not describe a timelock on upgrades.

Only the AMM v4, CPMM and CLMM programs have public source code. LaunchLab, the router, the Stable AMM, the LP locker and the farm programs do not, so they can be checked only against their published interfaces and on-chain bytecode.

Audits on file cover the main programs. They include Kudelski Security (2021), OtterSec (2022), MadShield, now OShield (2023 and 2024), Halborn (Burn & Earn in 2024, LaunchLab in 2025) and Sec3 (CPMM in 2025, CLMM limit orders and dynamic fees in 2026). A bug bounty runs on Immunefi. Raydium's own docs point out that audits do not cover economic attacks, MEV or the front end.

The one major incident was in December 2022, when the key that controlled AMM v4 pools was compromised (DefiLlama classes the cause as malware) and several pools were drained, about $4.4 million according to DefiLlama. Raydium moved the authority to a multisig and says the community approved compensation for affected liquidity providers from fees set aside for buybacks.

The main ways a Raydium user can lose money:

• Fake or malicious tokens: anyone can create a pool, so a ticker or logo proves nothing; check the mint address.
• Impermanent loss: liquidity providers can end up with less value than if they had held the two tokens, and CLMM positions stop earning when the price leaves their range.
• Launch risk: LaunchLab tokens are new and thinly traded, and can lose most of their value quickly.
• Front-running: large swaps with loose slippage can be sandwiched by bots; see how MEV works.
• Admin risk: multisig holders can upgrade programs or change pool fees.

Open raydium.io, which Raydium says is its only domain, connect a Solana wallet that supports versioned transactions, and keep about 0.02 SOL for fees. For a swap, paste the token's mint address instead of searching by name, set slippage, and approve in your wallet.

Getting out is the reverse. Liquidity in CPMM and AMM v4 pools is returned by burning LP tokens on the pool or portfolio page, which pays your share of both tokens plus earned fees. CLMM positions are NFTs that you close the same way, collecting fees and rewards. Staked LP tokens or RAY must be unstaked first. Liquidity locked through Burn & Earn cannot be withdrawn, only its fees collected. For a wider view of trading costs, see how Raydium compares with other decentralized exchanges.

Dates come from Raydium's history page and changelog.

• February 2021: mainnet launch with AMM v4 tied to the Serum order book.
• August 2022: CLMM concentrated liquidity on mainnet.
• December 2022: pool authority key compromised; roles moved to a Squads multisig.
• February 2024: RAY team and seed vesting ends.
• 2024: CPMM goes live and becomes the default for new pools.
• 2025: LaunchLab audited by Halborn and in use for token launches.
• July 2026: RAY MiCA white paper published; OpenBook dependency removed from AMM v4.
• October 2026: anyone can create additional CLMM pools for the same pair and fee tier.