Atrix — Beginning the Journey Towards Permissionless Liquidity — Serum Stories #7
“Atrix allocates all of it’s liquidity towards the orders it places on Serum, since Serum will be the central location for liquidity on Solana.”
Welcome to Serum Stories #7
Today when we talk about composability in DeFi, we’re referring to the innovative feature whereby separate applications can connect as if they were native and generate otherwise unachievable synergies and opportunities for the end user.
This week, we are pleased to present Atrix — a new and exciting project composing directly with Serum. Atrix is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) built on Solana that composes directly with Serum’s orderbook to allow for permissionless liquidity pools and farm creation.
Today, the Atrix team is celebrating the release of their devnet launch — a completely permissionless interface that allows you to swap, add liquidity directly on Serum, and easily create liquidity mining farms.
In this week’s installment, we welcome the Atrix team, who shared with us what they’re building, their founding story, and perspectives on the importance of permissionless systems.
What’s up Next
1 — What is Atrix
2 — Background
3 — How Atrix works
4 — Permissionless liquidity!
5 — Design choices
6 — Final thoughts
1. For the audience who may not be familiar with Atrix, what is your elevator pitch for new users?
Atrix is an AMM for Serum which allows users to permissionlessly create their own liquidity pools and liquidity mining farms.
Need liquidity and incentives for your project’s token? Use Atrix and set up your Serum liquidity pools and liquidity mining farms in under a minute, without writing any code.
2. You’ve been building on the down-low for the last couple months and are ready to unleash Atrix protocol. Today’s your big day.
Firstly, congratulations on your devnet launch! Tell us a little about your background and what led you to build on Solana?
Thanks! It’s very exciting to launch and get valuable feedback from the community.
My background is in software engineering and startups, so the idea that code is the fundamental arbiter of truth and value got me hooked on writing smart contracts after DeFi summer. Especially since I came from the world of traditional software businesses, which often have many business layers above the actual code.
Solana initially caught my interest because of it’s programming model and crazy TPS numbers. And after some tinkering and seeing the amazing builders Solana attracted, it became obvious that my days of writing Solidity code were over.
3. Atrix is unique in that it’s designed to share all of its liquidity directly with Serum.
For those who aren’t familiar with how this works would you mind explaining how Atrix will compose directly with the Serum dex?
Sure! Some background knowledge — AMMs work by creating liquidity pools that users use to trade assets without someone actively being on the other side of the trade.
Atrix implements the x*y=k AMM curve for orderbooks, like Serum’s. Atrix places a number of bid and ask orders at positions along the curve. As the orders get filled and the ratio of tokens changes, Atrix refreshes the orders on the book to reflect the new ratio. Atrix allocates all of it’s liquidity towards the orders it places on Serum, since Serum will be the central location for liquidity on Solana.
4. You plan on making it possible for any project to easily create pools and farms, including making it possible for any Ethereum (or EVM based chain) AMM to share liquidity directly with Serum.
Would you mind expanding on how this works?
Yup! Users will be able to permissionlessly create liquidity pools for any token pairs they want, similar to Uniswap. Users will also be able to create farms for their pools entirely through the user interface.
For example, say you launch a token called TKN. You want people to be able to buy and sell this token on Serum, so you create a TKN-USDC pool on Atrix. Now people can buy and sell TKN, but there isn’t much liquidity. So you create a farm on Atrix with a few clicks, specifying that you will distribute 1,000,000 TKN per day for staking the TKN-USDC Atrix LP token in this farm. Since your liquidity pool is now incentivized, people deposit more liquidity and your project grows!
By using the Atrix interface, EVM based projects can easily set up pools and farms on Solana, without having to write any Rust code. And by utilizing cross-chain bridges, like Wormhole, they can also bring their project’s tokens to distribute in their farms as incentives.
5. You mentioned your vision for Atrix is aligned with the ethos of permissionless and easy to use systems. This is great!
What are your thoughts on the benefits and trade-offs of these design choices at early stages of product development?
The benefits of these choices is that Atrix can attract a lot more usage by being a flexible and easy to use protocol that even non-technical people can use to set up previously complex farming operations.
The trade off is building this flexibility into the system to make sure it can accommodate users’ needs. However, Solana’s unique programming model allows for a lot of flexible systems where effectively new instances of a program can be easily spun up through an interface, since the program and data can be entirely independent. I personally think this aspect of Solana is a bit underexplored, and would love to see more implementations of it.
6. We’re all very excited to see what’s next for Atrix. Are there any last words you would like to leave for our audience?
Thanks for your support! For the audience, if you’re a project looking for automated liquidity for your Serum market, or want to incentivize liquidity through yield farming, or if you’re just someone who wants to do some farming, check out Atrix and join our community!
We hope you enjoyed the interview!
We would love to continue having these kinds of conversations with all the incredible teams building on Serum and sharing them with you. Just let us know who you want to read about next!
You can keep up with the Atrix team and development through their Twitter, Discord, and of course, their website.
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Read An Ultimate Vision for Project Serum
Read Building on Serum’s Vision
Check out Serum’s Developer Resources and Project Ideas
Listen to Sam Bankman-Fried’s breakdown of the Serum ecosystem
