Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, has revealed plans for a new decentralized exchange (DEX) named Percolator, aimed at advancing perpetual futures trading on the Solana blockchain.
Posted on GitHub this Monday, Percolator is designed as a sharded protocol to facilitate perpetual trading — a form of decentralized trading for futures contracts without expiry dates. This allows traders to speculate on cryptocurrency price movements indefinitely while maintaining decentralized control.
According to Yakovenko’s proposal, Percolator will comprise two principal on-chain components: the Router program and the Slab program. The Router program will oversee collateral management, portfolio margin calculations, and cross-slab routing. Meanwhile, the Slab program will handle the perpetuals engine, operating on liquidity provided by market participants. It promises “fully self-contained” functionality for matching trades and settling positions directly on-chain.
This announcement follows closely behind recent developments in Solana-related decentralized finance. Just a week prior, the Hyperliquid DEX upgraded its protocol with the Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3 (HIP-3), enabling third parties to deploy their own permissionless perpetual swap contracts. This upgrade introduced independent margins and customizable parameters for users staking a substantial amount of HYPE tokens — specifically, at least 500,000 tokens valued at approximately $18.2 million at the time.
Hyperliquid has seen significant growth recently, with trading volume hitting a monthly peak of $319 billion in July 2024. Such performance points to a rising preference among cryptocurrency traders for decentralized exchanges over centralized platforms. The exchange’s surge partly comes at the expense of ecosystems like Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain.
Supporting this observation, a report from investment firm VanEck noted that Hyperliquid had attracted high-value Solana users by offering a user-friendly product with a straightforward design. The report highlighted that Hyperliquid captured 35% of all blockchain revenue in July, showing notable displacement from Solana’s share in that market.
Within the competitive perpetual DEX landscape, Aster, which operates on Binance’s BNB Chain, recently surpassed Hyperliquid as the largest perp DEX by daily trading volume—reporting $14.5 billion daily, nearly tripling Hyperliquid’s 24-hour volume. However, Hyperliquid maintained a stronger 30-day trading volume, nearly double that of Aster, according to data from DefiLlama.
It is worth noting that Aster was re-added to DefiLlama’s listings this week after a temporary removal due to concerns about unverifiable data transparency. The relisting signals increased confidence in its reported trading activity.
When reached for comment, the Solana Foundation had not responded by the time of publication.
Percolator’s introduction by Solana’s founding leadership indicates a continued push to innovate within decentralized perpetual futures markets. By utilizing Solana’s high-speed blockchain infrastructure and sharded architecture, the protocol aims to deliver scalable, efficient trading solutions that further empower traders and liquidity providers alike.
