At the beginning of this month, FTX filed for bankruptcy with much furor, but unfortunately many companies had exposure to the major crypto exchange. This was also the case for the decentralized exchange (DEX) Serum, which is now facing serious liquidity problems. The platform will be locked, but a second version is planned: OpenBook, a so-called hard fork of serum.
Serum forked: new DEX
On Twitter explains Serum that platform ‘inoperative’ is because FTX and the linked company Alameda Research went under. Only FTX insiders would have control over whether and which upgrades are made. But nunspecified security risks led to the software becoming obsolete. Reportedly, Serum’s old source code was stolen in the FTX hack.
Serum’s community chooses to set up a completely new DeFi platform under the name OpenBook. This platform should be completely separate from FTX and Alameda. Of course, the platform will continue to use the Solana (SOL) blockchain. OpenBook was formerly known as Serum V3.
The future of Serum’s own SRM token is uncertain due to its exposure to FTX and Alameda. Some members of the Serum community believe that SRM should remain in use, but others want it to be phased out altogether.
However, there’s hope.
Led by Mango’s Max, a community-wide effort to fork Serum is going strong.@openbookdex is currently live on Solana mainnet with over >$1M daily volume. Further efforts to expand this project and its liquidity are underway.https://t.co/OhbUXqBRdt
— Serum (@ProjectSerum) November 29, 2022
Serum in trouble after FTX bankruptcy
Midway through this month, it became clear that FTX’s sister company Alameda Research had a lot of exposure to FTX. Because Alameda was a major market maker on Serum, the volume collapsed about 85% from $32 billion to just $3.5 million. Wrapped bitcoin on Solana (SOBTC), for example, was for sale for only $ 1,950, while the price was still around $ 16,500 at the time. The same was true of the many other tokens on the platform.