A decentralized exchange and a platform for building DApps, Serum was initially built to become the backbone of DeFi on the Solana blockchain, but its glory days seem to be over. Today, the project told its 215k followers on Twitter that the protocol became defunct as its liquidity has dropped to near-zero.
The apparent $400 million hack of FTX has shattered the devs’ confidence in Serum DEX, as some speculated that its “upgrade authority” may also be compromised.
“With the collapse of Alameda and FTX, the Serum program on mainnet became defunct. As upgrade authority is held by FTX, security is in jeopardy, leading to protocols like Jupiter Exchange and Raydium Protocol moving away from Serum,” the team explained.
However, Serum also expressed hopes that the protocol will be reviewed under the name of OpenBook, a community fork of the original Serum led by Mango Max, a developer at Solana-based Mango Markets DEX that suffered a $114 million exploit earlier this month.
The future of Serum’s native SRM token remains “uncertain,” the team says. As Serum explained, there are proposals to ditch SRM completely due to FTX/Alameda exposure, as well as proposals to reinstate it as a utility token that provides discounts on platform fees.
For context, FTX was heavily invested in Serum, as its balance sheet listed $2.2 billion in SRM tokens among other assets. On Friday, Binance delisted three Serum trading pairs, although the token is still listed on Kraken and KuCoin.
