Serum goes defunct after FTX; OpenBook forks the books
Serum’s Solana CLOB underpinned much of early Solana DeFi, but upgrade authority lived with FTX. After FTX’s November 2022 bankruptcy and related unauthorized transfers, protocols including Jupiter and Raydium disabled Serum markets over security concerns. Project Serum acknowledged the mainnet program was defunct and pointed to a community fork—OpenBook—as the safer continuation of the order-book code, while SRM’s future remained entangled with the FTX estate’s concentrated holdings.