A brief look at the data behind Serum

A non-custodial exchange Serum was announced in late July amid the DeFi craze and launched in late August. Serum is the brainchild of the Serum Foundation — which includes FTX and Alameda Research staff, as well as external partners and advisors. Some of the partners include Multicoin Capital, Kyber Network, CoinGecko, and Gauntlet Network. The advisors include Compound’s Robert Leshner and Calvin Liu, Dan Matuszewski from CMS, and many others.

Per the whitepaper, Serum was built to address some of the limitations of AMMs on Ethereum — particularly the speed and cost while remaining non-custodial. On the base layer, Ethereum doesn’t have the throughput to handle orderbook matching (even though this is something that will likely be possible on Layer-2 solutions and eventually through sharding).