Verdict
A solid Solana AMM with concentrated liquidity and real depth on majors, whose business changed overnight when the launchpad that drove most of its volume built its own exchange. Still useful; no longer central.
- Best for
- Solana liquidity provision and direct pool access
- Cost
- 0.25% standard pool fee, lower on CLMM tiers
What works
- Concentrated liquidity pools with selectable fee tiers
- Genuine depth on SOL majors and the larger Solana tokens
- Permissionless pool creation makes it a default venue for new tokens
- Fee split funds RAY buybacks on a transparent, verifiable basis
What does not
- Lost the pump.fun graduation flow that drove much of its 2024–25 volume
- Permissionless listing means the token picker is full of traps
- Most users reach it through an aggregator and never see the interface
- Yields on incentivised pools depend on emissions that stop on a published date
For most of 2024 and early 2025, Raydium was the busiest AMM on Solana, and a very large share of that activity came from one place: tokens graduating from the pump.fun launchpad automatically seeded liquidity pools here.
In March 2025 pump.fun launched its own AMM and kept that flow. The volume moved almost immediately. Any review of Raydium written before that date is describing a different business, and any comparison using 2024 volume figures is describing a company that no longer exists in that form.
What the product actually is
Raydium runs standard AMM pools at a 0.25% fee — the bulk to liquidity providers, a slice funding RAY buybacks — alongside concentrated liquidity pools with selectable fee tiers for pairs that justify active management.
Depth on SOL majors and the larger Solana tokens is real. Routing quality when you use the interface directly is fine, though most users arrive via Jupiter and never see it, which is its own commentary on where value accrues in this stack.
Permissionless listing, and what it means for you
Anyone can create a pool. That is the correct design for an on-chain AMM and it is the reason new tokens have tradeable liquidity within minutes of launching.
It also means the token picker contains multiple entries with the same name and the same logo, only one of which is the asset you want. The protocol cannot protect you from this and does not try to. Verify the mint address from the project's own source every time, and treat any token that appeared in your wallet unprompted as hostile until proven otherwise.
On a permissionless AMM, the token list is user-generated content. Read it the way you would read user-generated content.
Providing liquidity
Concentrated pools on Raydium have the same economics as anywhere else: higher fee capture inside your chosen range, full conversion into the losing asset outside it, and a management burden that does not stop while you sleep.
Incentivised pools add emissions on top of fees. Read the emission schedule before you deposit — a yield that exists because of a fixed-term incentive programme disappears on a date that somebody has already published, and the TVL usually leaves with it.
Where it sits now
It remains a default destination for new Solana token liquidity outside the launchpad ecosystems.
It is a meaningful venue in Jupiter's routing set, which is how most of its volume now arrives.
It is no longer the centre of Solana's trading activity, and the token's economics reflect that clearly.
How it compares
Against Jupiter: not a real comparison — Jupiter routes into Raydium, and using Raydium directly makes sense mainly for liquidity provision or for a pool the aggregator is not yet reading. Against Orca: a matter of preference and whichever has the deeper pool for your pair on the day.
Verdict
The RAY buyback, and what it is worth
A slice of every pool fee funds buybacks of the protocol's token, executed on-chain and verifiable. As token mechanics go this is one of the more honest designs — the revenue is real, the buyback is observable, and nobody has to take a treasury's word for it.
The obvious caveat is that a buyback funded by trading fees is only as good as the trading fees, and this protocol has just demonstrated how quickly those can move to a competitor. A revenue-linked token is a leveraged bet on the protocol keeping its flow.
Using it directly versus through an aggregator
For a swap, use Jupiter — it will route into Raydium when Raydium has the best price and somewhere else when it does not, at no extra cost. There is almost no case for swapping on the Raydium interface manually.
The direct interface earns its place for liquidity provision, for farms, and for pools so new that an aggregator has not indexed them yet. That last case is also the case with the highest chance of the token being worthless, which is a coincidence worth noticing.
Score: 7.1. Well-built, honestly priced, and structurally diminished by losing a customer it had become dependent on. A good reminder that a DeFi protocol's revenue can have a single point of failure exactly like a company's, and that TVL charts do not show you concentration risk until it arrives.