Serum describes itself as a protocol and ecosystem for decentralized exchanges (DEX) that gives decentralized finance, exceptional speed, and cheap transaction costs. The Serum is based on Solana and is fully permissionless. Websites or applications that use Serum's protocol may adjust the experience to their target market's use case and compliance requirements.

Serum's ultimate goal is to accelerate De-Fi adoption across the world. Serum intends to offer De-Fi centralized exchanges, the speed and convenience while staying completely trustless and transparent. Further, users and developers were restricted by high gas prices and delayed transactions due to the popularity of De-Fi and the expansion of DEXs on Ethereum. The goal of Serum is to address these concerns and issues of centralization, capital inefficiencies, and liquidity fragmentation.

The whitepaper mentions that Serum is a decentralized exchange that offers trustless cross-chain trading at the speed and pricing that users choose. Despite being native to Solana, the ecosystem is interoperable with the Ethereum ecosystem and ERC20tokens. Developers are claimed to have complete control and freedom due to a decentralized on-chain order matching service that offers an infrastructure for trading apps. It is also claimed that anyone can build a trading app that can use Serum's liquidity and ecosystem advantages.

Serum offers a completely on-chain order book, allowing trading interfaces and other applications to 'plug into' Serum's modular ecosystem. The flexibility to determine the price, size, and direction of their transaction is claimed as a unique feature of this exchange mechanism for users. Serum DEX, built on top of the Asset Agnostic Order book, gives the ecosystem a larger pool of liquidity and a shared resource to support trading functionality. Permissioned marketplaces provide much more freedom and conformity.

Furthermore, Serum allows many applications and participants to share middleware in a single location. Serum-based programs offer more freedom while still adhering to basic design rules like composability. The native token of the ecosystem is SRM. Serum's utility and governance token is also SRM. The users get a fee reduction if they keep SRM in their wallets. SRM is completely integrated with Serum and can take advantage of burn fees.

Serum was founded on August 31, 2020. The whitepaper was published in July 2020. The total supply of SRM is ten billion coins.