SRM is the native token of Serum, a decentralized exchange based on the Solana blockchain.

Serum launched in August 2020, trading at $1.70. Aside from a brief spurt to $3.60 in early September, SRM bumbled along at about $1.20 until 2021. When bitcoin rose to its first high of the year in the second quarter, SRM hit highs of $11.73. When BTC crashed, so did SRM, which fell to $2.46 in July 2021.

SRM’s all-time high of $13.72 on Sept. 11, 2021 preceded BTC’s all-time high by about two months; it’s a similar story for most decentralized finance (DeFi) coins. And, like most of DeFi, SRM crashed hard going into 2022. By June, it had fallen to lows of 94 cents.

Serum’s total-value locked (TVL) peaked at $1.88 billion in early November 2021, just as crypto’s market cap hit an all-time high. Serum’s TVL crashed along with its price. At the start of June 2022, Serum’s TVL had fallen to just $288 million.

SRM has a fixed, capped supply of 10,161,000,000. It released 10% of these at launch. The rest will be released linearly until August 2027. Contributors and early investors, whose tokens are subject to lockups, will receive 46% of the supply. The remaining 54% will be used to incentivize activity on Serum and collaborate with other protocols.

Each week, Serum burns SRM equivalent to four-fifths of the exchange’s revenue, and gives the rest to SRM stakers.

Serum is a decentralized exchange based on the Solana blockchain. Rather than relying on the automated market maker model made popular by Uniswap and Curve, which facilitates token swaps from huge reserves of tokens called liquidity pools, Serum relies on an order book.

Order books match buyers with sellers. Place an order to sell $10 worth of SOL for USDC and Serum will pair the trade with someone who wants to buy $10 worth of SOL for USDC. Centralized crypto exchanges, like FTX and Binance, operate this way.

This model doesn’t work so well on the Ethereum blockchain, where a single trade can easily cost $100 in times of network congestion. Solana is cheaper; trades on Serum cost $0.00002 in gas.

SRM is Serum’s governance token. It also entitled holders to reduced trading fees on Serum, and those that stakes SRM on Serum also receive 20% of fees on the platform.

The protocol also has a second token, megaSerum (MSRM), that is required to run a staking node on Serum. It entitles holders to increased rewards and is created by locking up 1 million SRM tokens.

Serum was created by the Serum Foundation. Among its most notable members are crypto trading firm Alameda Research and crypto exchange FTX. Both were founded by multi-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, a major Solana investor.

Serum raised $20 million in a private seed round and $660,000 in two token sales on FTX and BitMax.

While Serum is native to Solana, SRM also trades as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. Serum integrated with Solana’s cross-chain bridge, Wormhole. In November 2019, Serum partnered with Raydium to provide additional liquidity to the hybrid decentralized exchange (DEX).