AlphaRay is a Co-founder of Raydium, an on-chain order book automated market maker (AMM) built on the Solana blockchain. ^[1]

Career

With a background in algorithmic trading for commodities, AlphaRay transitioned to market-making and liquidity-providing in the cryptocurrency space in 2017. In the summer of 2020, after exploring DeFi, Alpha identified the need for an order book AMM to aggregate liquidity. This led him to assemble a team of experienced trading developers to address this challenge directly. ^[1]

Raydium

In the beginning, the Raydium team engaged extensively in DeFi activities such as swapping, liquidity providing, borrowing, lending, yield farming, and governance participation. However, by September 2020, they observed significant inefficiencies in Ethereum, including high fees and long wait times. Recognizing the need for improvement, they collaborated with the Serum team^[6], aligning with their vision and identifying the necessity for Raydium to enhance DeFi accessibility and functionality. ^[3]

Launched in February 2021, Raydium was co-founded by pseudonymous members; AlphaRay, XRay, and GammaRay (RAY). AlphaRay is in charge of strategy and operations, GammaRay is in charge of marketing and communications, and XRay is the Chief of Technology and Dev Team leader. ^[2]

"Raydium is the on-ramp to the Solana ecosystem: we bridge great projects to an amazing community. To users, it’s where you go to swap, earn yields, and participate in the IDOs of your favourite projects. To projects, it’s a fundraising platform, market maker, and exchange all rolled into one package." - AlphaRay described Raydium in an interview^[3]

On challenges of being first, AlphaRay responded that during Raydium's development, the team encountered several challenges. Initially, with only Serum on Solana, they had limited codebases to reference, necessitating building from scratch. Solana’s rapid updates often caused previously functioning code to break, requiring constant adjustments. ^[3]

Post-launch, the ecosystem's limited projects meant few unique tokens in Raydium’s pools, risking community loss. To address this, they created the AcceleRaytor program to launch and advise new projects, ensuring sufficient liquidity for trading. Their first AcceleRaytor project’s success led to unprecedented traffic on Solana, prompting extensive infrastructure scaling. ^[3]

"We set out on this mission to help people who couldn’t afford expensive gas fees and give them tools that the traditional financial world wouldn’t give them.

As a builder, everything really comes together when you see that you have solved a real world problem and that you’ve made positive impacts on peoples’ lives." - AlphaRay on what makes it all worth it^[3]

RAY Token

The RAY token has a hard cap of 555 million tokens. The total mining reserve for RAY is 34% of all tokens, amounting to 188.7 million RAY. Partnership & Ecosystem: 30%, Team: 20% (Locked 1-3 years), Liquidity: 8%, Community Pool: 6% (Locked 1 year), and Advisors: 2% (Locked 1-3 years). ^[4]

Future Developments for Raydium

AlphaRay discussed several future developments for Raydium, emphasizing the platform's potential expansion and innovation. While Solana remains an efficient blockchain, Raydium is open to expanding to other evolving chains such as Avalanche, Cosmos, and Polkadot. ^[5]

Cross-chain interactions are also a key focus, with plans to leverage the Wormhole bridge and partnerships with platforms like SushiSwap to enhance interoperability between different blockchain ecosystems. Additionally, Raydium is considering incorporating NFT features and markets, given the growing interest in NFTs on Solana. ^[2][5]