What is Raydium?

Raydium is a Solana automated market maker where you can swap SPL tokens, supply liquidity, mint a new coin, or take leveraged positions from one web app. Its pools hold close to $806 million in deposits, more than any other decentralized exchange on Solana can claim today.

The protocol went live in February 2021 under a pseudonymous team, pairing constant-product pools with Serum's central limit order book, a design later inherited by OpenBook. That hybrid architecture is now history, because a July 2026 program update stripped the OpenBook dependency out of the code entirely.

Five years of releases grew a single pool program into four, sitting alongside farms, a bonding-curve launchpad, and perpetual futures on a separate order book. Cumulative trading volume passed $1 trillion in May 2026, the same month RAY was listed by both Robinhood and Revolut.

Getting started requires a Solana wallet such as Phantom or Solflare, plus a small SOL balance to cover network fees on every signature. You can fund that wallet with an exchange withdrawal or by bridging assets across from another chain, or through an on-ramp built into the wallet itself.

How Does Raydium Work?

Behind one interface, Raydium operates several independent Solana programs. A router picks between them on every trade, liquidity providers choose which curve to deposit into, and separate programs handle reward emissions, bonding-curve launches, and leveraged positions.

Swaps and how routing picks a pool

Every quote on the swap page is the outcome of a comparison. The router computes expected output across each eligible pool, selects whichever returns the most after fees, then breaks ties by depth, since a larger pool absorbs the next incoming trade with less price movement.

Single-pool routes win by default. Multi-hop paths compound fees and slippage at every leg, so the router only picks one when it beats the direct option by at least five basis points, while unusually large orders get split across two pools to soften the price impact.

The two settings you control are slippage tolerance, which defaults to 0.5%, and a priority fee spanning normal, fast, and turbo tiers. Confirmation typically lands within five to fifteen seconds, and most failed Solana transactions trace back to one of those two inputs being set too low.

The four pool types behind Raydium liquidity

Liquidity providers pick a program before they pick a pair, because each of Raydium's four AMMs prices trades differently, charges its own fee tiers, and issues a different kind of receipt for your deposit.

Here is what separates the pool types available on Raydium:

• CLMM: Concentrated liquidity inside a price band you choose, issued as a position NFT. Capital efficient, the deepest program today, and it demands genuine range management.
• CPMM: The modern constant-product pool and default choice for new pairs. Cheap to deploy, natively Token-2022 compatible, and it rewards passive depositors with fungible LP tokens.
• AMM v4: The original 2021 program, still holding legacy pairs and roughly $300 million. New pool creation moved to CPMM, and its OpenBook order-book link was removed in July 2026.
• Stable AMM: A lookup-table curve designed for assets that track each other closely, such as stablecoin pairs, cutting the slippage a plain constant-product formula would otherwise charge traders.
• Limit orders: CLMM pools can now park single-tick orders that fill first-in-first-out when a swap crosses your chosen price, then settle to your wallet without you being online.
• Dynamic fees: Opt-in CLMM pools apply a volatility surcharge that climbs during rapid tick movement and decays afterwards, compensating depositors through turbulent stretches without anyone manually widening their range.
• Farms: A separate emissions program pays bonus reward tokens on staked LP positions, supporting as many as five simultaneous reward streams per farm on the current version.
• Burn & Earn: Permanently locks a CPMM or CLMM position while handing you a transferable Fee Key NFT, which keeps the right to claim that position's trading fees indefinitely.

Farming, RAY staking, and buybacks

Swap fees are only half of what a liquidity position can earn on Raydium. Projects fund farms that emit reward tokens to anyone staking eligible LP tokens, and CLMM pools can attach up to three reward streams directly to the pool without needing a separate farm contract.

Staking RAY works on different terms, since a single-asset deposit carries no impermanent loss and pays rewards drawn from protocol emissions. Roughly 1.9 million RAY leaves the mining reserve annually to fund those programs, which puts it alongside the other Solana staking options worth comparing before you commit.

The token absorbs demand from the fee side too. Twelve percent of every pool's trading fee is spent on RAY buybacks, which means activity across swaps, launches, and farms converts into recurring purchases whether or not you personally hold, stake, or provide any liquidity of your own.

Bonding-curve launches through LaunchLab

Launching a token once meant seeding both sides of a pool from your own treasury. LaunchLab removed that barrier by deploying a bonding curve instead, where buyers send SOL and receive tokens at a price the curve derives from how much supply has already sold.

Once the curve collects its funding target, graduation fires automatically and permissionlessly. The program snapshots both reserves, opens a CPMM pool through a cross-program call, and revokes the mint authority so no additional supply can ever appear behind the holders who bought in during the curve phase.

How to Use Raydium

Everything below runs from raydium.io with a connected wallet, no account creation or registration involved anywhere. Spot trading, liquidity provision, pool deployment, and staking each take under a minute once your SOL balance covers network fees.

1. Swap tokens without getting slipped

The swap tab handles routine trades against Raydium's own pools, displaying the selected route, price impact, and minimum received before you sign anything. Reading those three fields prevents the majority of bad fills.

Here is how to swap tokens on Raydium:

1. Connect wallet: Open raydium.io/swap and connect a Solana wallet holding both the token you intend to sell and enough spare SOL to cover the network fees on each transaction.
2. Pick pair: Select your input and output tokens, then type an amount into either box so the opposite side auto-populates from the live quote Raydium returns.
3. Read route: Check which pool or pools the router selected, alongside the fee tier, total liquidity, and price impact displayed beside every hop in the panel.
4. Set slippage: Use 0.1% on stablecoin pairs, 0.5% on majors, and up to 5% on thin memecoins where quotes shift between your signature and actual execution.
5. Choose priority: Raise the priority fee to fast or turbo during network congestion, which improves the odds of landing without changing the price you were quoted.
6. Sign transaction: Approve in your wallet, wait for confirmation, then compare the amount you actually received against the original quote using the explorer link provided afterwards.

2. Add liquidity and start collecting fees

Depositing into a pool earns a proportional cut of its trading fees, credited continuously. CPMM positions stay passive and fungible, while CLMM positions concentrate capital inside a range you nominate and stop earning entirely outside it.

Follow these steps to add liquidity on Raydium:

1. Choose pool: Search by token pair or pool address, then compare the fee tier, total liquidity, and recent volume before committing any capital to a position.
2. Select type: Pick CPMM for a hands-off deposit, or CLMM when you intend to monitor price closely and adjust your range whenever the market moves against it.
3. Set range: CLMM deposits need both a lower and an upper bound. Narrow bands earn considerably more per dollar deposited, though they fall out of range far faster.
4. Enter amounts: Type one side and the interface fills the other at the pool's current ratio, warning you clearly about any single-sided or out-of-range deposit conditions.
5. Confirm deposit: Approve the transaction, then verify that LP tokens or a position NFT arrived in your wallet by opening the Raydium portfolio page immediately afterwards.
6. Stake optionally: Move eligible LP tokens into a matching farm for extra reward emissions, layered on top of the swap fees your position already collects each day.

3. Create a pool for a new token

Pool creation is permissionless, so any SPL or Token-2022 mint can have a live market within minutes. CPMM is the recommended default and costs roughly 0.19 SOL once the creation fee and account rent are combined.

Here is how to create a Raydium liquidity pool:

1. Open creation: Head to the pool creation section, connect your wallet, and choose between a standard CPMM pool and a concentrated CLMM pool for the pair.
2. Enter mints: Paste both token mint addresses, confirming the base token is the exact contract you intend to list rather than a copycat with identical branding.
3. Pick fee tier: Select 0.01% for correlated assets, 0.25% for standard pairs, or 1% where volatility and thin two-sided interest justify charging traders considerably more per swap.
4. Set opening price: Deposit both sides at equal value, since that ratio defines the starting price arbitrage traders will immediately test against every external market they can reach.
5. Confirm pool: Approve the transaction and pay the 0.15 SOL creation fee, after which your pair becomes instantly tradable and visible to routers and third-party aggregators.
6. Add incentives: Create a farm or attach CLMM reward streams if you want third-party liquidity providers to deposit into the pool alongside your own opening position.

4. Stake RAY and harvest what you earn

Rewards on Raydium never compound automatically. Farm emissions, CLMM trading fees, and staking rewards all sit accruing until you claim them, so periodic harvesting is simply part of running any position here.

Use these steps to stake RAY and collect rewards:

1. Open staking: Navigate to the staking section with a wallet holding RAY, then review the current reward rate carefully before committing any portion of your balance.
2. Deposit RAY: Enter the amount you want to stake and approve the transaction, which locks nothing and leaves your balance fully withdrawable at any point afterwards.
3. Check portfolio: Open the portfolio page to see staked balances, farm positions, unclaimed CLMM fees, and pending rewards listed across every active reward stream you hold.
4. Harvest rewards: Click harvest on any farm position to sweep pending reward tokens into your wallet without touching or withdrawing the underlying staked LP deposit itself.
5. Collect fees: CLMM positions need a separate collect action, because accrued swap fees sit against your individual position instead of inside the shared pool reserves themselves.
6. Time your claims: Batch small amounts together instead of claiming daily, since every harvest costs a network fee that quietly erodes minor pending reward balances over time.

Raydium's LaunchLab Explained

LaunchLab arrived in April 2025, weeks after Pump.fun moved graduated liquidity onto its own exchange. It has since become shared infrastructure for third-party launchpads, with Bonk.fun routing a large share of its graduations straight into Raydium pools.

How to create a token on LaunchLab

Two modes exist. JustSendit ships sensible defaults and a fixed 85 SOL graduation target, while LaunchLab mode exposes supply, curve allocation, vesting, and post-migration fee sharing for teams running a structured launch.

Here is how to launch a token on LaunchLab:

1. Select mode: Open the creation page and pick JustSendit for a launch that takes about a minute, or LaunchLab mode when you want full control over the configuration.
2. Add details: Enter the name, ticker, logo, description, and social links, since discoverability on a crowded launchpad depends heavily on how complete and credible your token metadata looks.
3. Configure supply: In LaunchLab mode, set the total supply and the share of it sold on the bonding curve, which can range between 51% and 80%.
4. Set target: Choose a SOL fundraising goal of at least 24 SOL, remembering that an overly ambitious target risks a curve that never graduates at all.
5. Plan vesting: Optionally lock supply behind a cliff and linear unlock, allocating every locked token to a beneficiary before graduation, because unallocated amounts get stranded permanently.
6. Launch and buy: Sign the creation transaction and consider a small opening buy, which deters sniping bots from capturing your early supply at effectively zero cost in the opening seconds.

What creators actually earn after graduation

Bonding-curve trades carry a flat 1% fee while a token remains on the curve, and platforms can route a configurable slice of that back to whoever created the launch. Those amounts accumulate inside a vault and stay claimable from the portfolio page at any point afterwards.

Graduation is where the durable revenue sits. Raydium's default policy splits the migrated LP tokens ninety-ten, permanently burning the larger share and minting the remainder to the creator as a Fee Key NFT that claims 10% of the graduated pool's trading fees for as long as that pool keeps trading.

Expectations deserve calibration before anyone launches. Dune dashboards have consistently shown graduation rates below 1% across LaunchLab's history, meaning the overwhelming majority of launches never reach a pool at all, and a Fee Key transferred carelessly to another wallet takes its future fee claims with it.

Raydium Perps Explained

Perpetual futures on Raydium are a separate product from its pools, running at perps.raydium.io on a gasless central limit order book operated by Orderly Network rather than against Solana AMM liquidity.

Below is what defines Raydium Perps in 2026:

• Leverage: Up to 100x depending on the market, with margin requirements and liquidation thresholds set by Orderly's risk engine instead of by Raydium's own smart contracts.
• Gasless orders: Placing, amending, and cancelling orders costs nothing and needs no on-chain transaction, since only deposits and withdrawals actually touch the Solana blockchain at all.
• Collateral: Deposit USDC, SOL, USDT, ETH, BNB, WBTC, YUSD, or USD1 from their native chains, with every position's profit and loss finally settling in USDC.
• Margin mode: Cross-margin only, meaning each open position draws on shared collateral, while one-way mode stops you from holding opposing sides of the same market simultaneously.
• Order types: Market, limit, stop, and scale orders with IOC, FOK, post-only, and reduce-only flags, matching the toolkit that centralized derivatives desks already give their traders today.
• Fees: Makers pay nothing at all, takers start at 4.5 basis points and tier down to 2 above $80 million of 30-day volume, plus 1 USDC per withdrawal.
• Restrictions: Residents of the United States and several sanctioned jurisdictions cannot access the product, in contrast to Raydium's fully permissionless spot pools and token launchpad.
• Custody: Collateral stays inside your own perps account throughout, so no Raydium-controlled wallet ever takes custody of trader funds at any point while a position remains open.

Raydium and Tokenized Stocks on Solana

The quietest shift in Raydium's business has also been the largest. Its concentrated liquidity pools host most xStocks trading pairs, which makes the protocol the primary market for tokenized equities such as TSLAx, NVDAx, and SPYx across Solana, alongside the memecoins it is better known for.

The numbers behind that shift moved quickly. Solana processed $5.77 billion in tokenized asset spot volume during the second quarter of 2026, and on June 24 tokenized equities out-traded memecoins as a share of the network's daily spot volume for the first time on record.

That flow needs compliance rails, which arrived on July 23, 2026, when Raydium shipped permissioned pools alongside a comparable Uniswap standard. Issuers now gate access at the program level instead of the front end, with tokenization firm Superstate integrating first for its registered equity products.

For traders, the practical outcome is an AMM carrying memecoins and regulated instruments side by side in one interface. Anyone comparing execution across tokenized stock platforms will find Raydium pools sitting behind a substantial share of the on-chain equity liquidity available on Solana right now.

Raydium Fees

Costs on Raydium depend entirely on which program you touch, since swap fees, launch fees, and derivatives fees follow separate schedules with different splits between liquidity providers, the treasury, and RAY buybacks.

Below is a breakdown of every fee Raydium charges:

• Standard swaps: A 0.25% rate is the default tier across CLMM, CPMM, and AMM v4 pools, applied to your input amount before any curve math executes.
• Fee tiers: CLMM pools offer 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.25%, and 1% options, while CPMM creators pick between 0.01%, 0.25%, and 1% when they first deploy a new pool.
• Fee split: CLMM and CPMM route 84% to liquidity providers, 12% to RAY buybacks, and 4% to treasury, whereas AMM v4 splits its fee 88% and 12%.
• Pool creation: Deploying a CPMM or AMM v4 pool costs 0.15 SOL plus account rent, while CLMM pools skip the creation fee and cost roughly 0.075 SOL.
• LaunchLab curves: A flat 1% applies to every buy and sell before graduation, and migration into a CPMM pool consumes about 0.04 SOL from the collected reserves.
• Perpetual trading: Zero maker fee, a 4.5 basis point taker fee that scales down with volume, and a flat 1 USDC charge applied on every single withdrawal.
• Referral links: Swapping through a shared Raydium link adds 1% of your input on top of the pool fee, paid directly to the link owner's wallet.
• Network fees: Solana itself charges roughly 0.0015 SOL for a CPMM swap, rising toward 0.003 SOL for CLMM swaps that cross several initialized ticks along the way.
• Token-2022 mints: Transfer fees configured by a token issuer stack on top of pool fees, occasionally pushing the effective cost of a single swap above 3%.

RAY Tokenomics

RAY is a fixed-supply SPL token with its mint authority permanently disabled, capped at 555 million units. Around 270 million circulate today, and every allocation from the original distribution has now fully unlocked.

RAY's total supply is distributed across six allocations:

• Mining reserve: 34%, or 188.7 million RAY, funds liquidity mining across farms and staking programs, and currently emits close to 1.9 million fresh tokens each year.
• Partnership and ecosystem: 30%, or 166.5 million RAY, backs integrations, grants, and ecosystem programs that expand the surfaces where Raydium liquidity gets routed, quoted, and consumed onchain.
• Team: 20%, or 111 million RAY, sat locked for a year after launch and then unlocked linearly, with the entire schedule completing in February 2024.
• Liquidity: 8%, or 44.4 million RAY, seeds market liquidity so traders moving meaningful size face reasonable slippage across the major RAY trading pairs on Solana.
• Community and seed: 6%, or 33.3 million RAY, followed exactly the same twelve-month cliff and twenty-four-month linear unlock schedule the team allocation used after the token generation event.
• Advisors: 2%, or 11.1 million RAY, was reserved for advisory incentives and sits in an identifiable on-chain address that anybody can independently verify at any time.
• Buyback flow: Twelve percent of trading fees collected across every pool type is spent buying RAY, tying token demand directly to measurable protocol activity instead of forward promises.
• Staking utility: Holders stake RAY for emissions drawn from the mining reserve, without any exposure to the impermanent loss that two-sided liquidity positions inevitably carry over time.

Is Raydium Safe?

Raydium's on-chain programs have been audited repeatedly since 2021 by Kudelski, OtterSec, MadShield, Halborn, and Sec3, with the most recent review covering the 2026 CLMM upgrade. Its Immunefi bounty pays up to $505,000 per critical finding and has distributed roughly $3.4 million to whitehat researchers so far.

Recent incidents still matter to any honest assessment. On June 10, 2026, an attacker drained $1.34 million from five dormant AMM V3 pools retired back in 2021, exploiting a validation gap in code the interface had stopped surfacing years earlier. Raydium reimbursed every loss from treasury.

Operational security tightened considerably after the December 2022 key compromise. Program authority now sits with a Squads multisig, upgraded in April 2026 to add a 24-hour timelock on administrative actions, which gives independent observers a window to spot a malicious transaction before it can execute.

The remaining risks belong to users rather than to code. Impermanent loss hits concentrated positions hardest, fewer than 1% of LaunchLab tokens graduate, perpetual positions liquidate quickly at high leverage, and an anonymous contributor team remains a governance question each user should weigh personally before depositing.

Raydium vs. Other Decentralized Exchanges

Raydium competes on three fronts at once: aggregators that route around its interface, rival AMMs chasing exactly the same liquidity providers, and derivatives platforms with far deeper perpetual order books. Each of the three comparisons lands somewhere different.

Raydium vs. Jupiter

Jupiter is an aggregator rather than a liquidity source, holding above 95% of Solana's DEX aggregator market share while charging no platform fee of its own. It searches every available pool, Raydium's included, and routes each order toward the best executable price it can find.

Roughly 60% of Jupiter's routed volume ends up filling against Raydium pools, so the relationship is complementary in practice. Jupiter optimizes execution quality for traders, while Raydium supplies the underlying inventory and passes the resulting fees back to whoever deposited it in the first place.

Raydium vs. Orca and Meteora

Orca's Whirlpools and Meteora's DLMM are the direct competitors for provider capital, each holding somewhere between $170 million and $235 million against Raydium's $806 million. Both have historically offered cleaner range-management interfaces, which matters for anyone rebalancing concentrated positions on volatile pairs every week or two.

Meteora's bin-based design shifts liquidity toward the current price automatically and applies dynamic fees, a feature Raydium answered in 2026 with its own opt-in volatility surcharge. Orca competes mainly on simplicity, which suits first-time providers testing concentrated liquidity without keeping a spreadsheet open beside them.

Raydium vs. Hyperliquid

For leveraged trading the gap is enormous. Hyperliquid clears around $172 billion in monthly perpetual volume at 0.015% maker and 0.045% taker fees, which dwarfs anything currently routed through the Orderly order book powering Raydium Perps. Depth, funding, and market breadth all favor the larger platform there.

Raydium's counterargument is consolidation. Spot liquidity, token launches, farms, and perpetuals share one wallet connection and one interface, which suits traders who treat decentralized perpetuals as a secondary feature beside their spot positions instead of a full-time workspace they sit in front of every single day.

Final Thoughts

Raydium in 2026 is a different protocol from the hybrid AMM that launched five years ago. The order book connection is gone, concentrated liquidity carries the business, and tokenized equities now compete directly with memecoins for depth inside its largest pools. That is a substantial reinvention.

That breadth is the strongest reason to use it. Few platforms let you swap blue chips, launch a token, farm emissions, and open a leveraged position without leaving a single connected wallet, and the fee tiers stay competitive across nearly all of those activities as well.

The caveats are equally clear and worth respecting. Total value locked has slipped over the past month, RAY still sits 96% below its 2021 peak, and June's legacy pool exploit proved that retired code can still cost real money. Size positions accordingly and check pool depth first.