## What is Raydium? Raydium is an automated market maker (AMM) and liquidity provider built on the Solana blockchain for the Serum decentralized exchange (DEX). Unlike any other AMMs, Raydium provides on-chain liquidity to a central limit orderbook meaning that funds deposited into Raydium are converted into limit orders which sit on Serum’s orderbooks. This gives Raydium LPs access to all of Serum’s order flow as well as their existing liquidity. RAY is the native utility token used for: * Staking to earn protocol fees * Staking to receive IDO allocations * Governance votes on protocol decisions ## How many RAY tokens are in circulation? Raydium launched its main net on February 21st, 2021 with 555,000,000 tokens created at genesis. 34% of all tokens will be released as liquidity mining incentives over a 3-year period. 30% of tokens are earmarked for partnerships and the expansion of the Raydium ecosystem. This includes giving grants to projects building projects around Raydium or helping our communities in general. These tokens are generally locked for 1 year and unlock linearly for the next 2 years. ### Who are the founders of Raydium Protocol? AlphaRay leads overall strategy, operations, product direction and business development for Raydium. With a background in algorithmic trading in commodities, Alpha transitioned to market making and liquidity providing for cryptocurrency in 2017 and hasn't looked back. After diving into DeFi in the summer of 2020, Alpha saw a market need for an order book AMM to aggregate liquidity, and with the release of Serum, pulled together a team of experienced trading developers to tackle the problem head on. XRay is Raydium's Chief of Technology and Dev Team leader. X has 8 years of experience as a trading and low latency systems architect for both traditional and crypto markets. X designs all of Raydium’s systems and infrastructure as needed. GammaRay heads up marketing and communications while also playing a key role in strategy and product direction. Gamma spent a large part of his career at a leading data analytics and market research firm, working on both client engagements and corporate marketing. Prior to Raydium, Gamma's focus within cryptocurrency has been technical analysis and discretionary trading. ### Where can I buy RAY? RAY is available on a growing number of exchanges with cryptocurrency and stablecoin pairs currently available. The most liquid exchanges include Raydium.io itself, FTX.com and gate.io