Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of Alameda Research and founder of cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX, says decentralized finance (DeFi) is promising, but has a ways to go before it’s ready for prime time.
Bankman-Fried is known for his exceptional trading skills, with Alameda Research handling approximately $1 billion in trades daily and ranking as one of the most profitable trading entities on BitMEX.
In a series of tweets, Bankman-Fried says DeFi is “hot, and exciting, and messy”, with the potential to power a financial ecosystem with inherent trust and without censorship. He believes the new blockchain Solana, which will host FTX’s new decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum, can address some potential issues facing DeFi applications that run on Ethereum.
“Anyone who’s used existing protocols has felt this: the frustration of waiting 5 minutes for a transaction before learning it failed because of something that happened after you sent it; seeing a estimated gas cost of $100 during peak times. It’s really holding back the space.
But it’s also where everything is. Most of the major apps and projects and aggregators and informational websites live on Ethereum, as does most of the community who built the space up. If you lose all of those, you sort of have nothing left. We’ve spent the last months immersing ourselves in the DeFi ecosystem. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone of you who helped teach us, entertained our ideas, and connected us. And especially to those who empowered and believed in us. And after drafts and experiments and revisions and feedback and iteration, we’re excited to tell you about what we’ve been working on. This is Project Serum.”
Solana launched its mainnet early this year, boasting the ability to process more than 50,000 transactions per second.
Bankman-Fried says the Solana blockchain will allow the decentralized exchange Serum to give users the experience they’re used to enjoying on centralized exchanges. Serum will utilize the new Solana-based token called SRM. The token will give holders discounts on trading fees and can be staked to help power the network.
Project Serum is a decentralized ecosystem built from the ground up to meet the world’s needs. Serum is fast, and it’s cheap, and powerful, and fully cross-chain compatible. And it’s truly, fully trustless.
Serum is built on the Solana blockchain. Solana can process 10,000 times as much as Ethereum; and it’s 1,000,000 times cheaper. And unlike many side chains, Solana is a fully fledged, decentralized blockchain with over 100 validators.
This allows Serum to have full central order limit books, with the familiar market, limit, and IOC orders; processing multiple times per second; all while being fully on chain. This is then combined with a powerful cross-chain protocol allowing for trustless and efficient tokenization and swaps, meaning that while living natively on Solana, Serum is interoperable on Ethereum.”
Bankman-Fried says both Serum and SRM will be rolling out in the next few weeks.
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