Solana Co-Founder Unveils Plans For New Decentralized Exchange ‘Percolator’

Solana co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has announced plans for a new decentralized exchange (DEX) called Percolator following the unprecedented success of Hyperliquid and Astar. 

The announcement comes two months after a VanEck report highlighted the growth of Hyperliquid at the expense of Solana and other large blockchains. 

Solana Co-Founder Announces Plans For New DEX 

Anatoly Yakovenko has become the latest crypto founder to highlight plans for a decentralized exchange. Yakovenko uploaded plans outlining a sharded perpetual exchange protocol on the Solana blockchain, calling the new DEX ‘Percolator.’ A perpetual exchange is a decentralized protocol for perpetual futures contracts. These contracts allow traders to speculate on cryptocurrency prices without an expiration date. The plans for the new protocol come after the success of platforms like Hyperliquid and Astar. 

Yakovenko released the documentation for Percolator on GitHub, describing it as “implementation-ready.” Percolator will consist of two primary on-chain programs, a Router program and a Slab program. The Router program manages collateral, portfolio margins, and cross-slab routing. Meanwhile, the Slab program acts as a matching engine that is overseen by liquidity providers. Each Slab program operates independently, allowing what Yakovenko calls “fully self-contained matching and settlement.”

Percolator’s GitHub repository already shows completed data structures for order books and memory pools. However, the development of the protocol’s liquidation systems is still in progress. 

Growing Competition 

The Solana Foundation has not stated whether Percolator will receive ecosystem support or will be a community-driven protocol. If the protocol is successful, it will add to the growing list of native financial primitives being developed on the Solana blockchain. The code for Percolator is currently under review on GitHub, with developers engaged with the repository stating that the project is “deep in testing.” This could mean that a launch is imminent once the protocol’s liquidation and governance protocols are finalized. Percolator joins an increasingly competitive derivatives-focused DEX space, with protocols like Hyperliquid expanding their footprint. 

Hyperliquid recently completed the implementation of permissionless, builder-deployed perpetual contracts through the HIP-3 upgrade. This allows users to stake a minimum of 500,000 HYPE tokens, worth $18 million, and launch their own perpetual markets with independent margin rules. 

Hyperliquid Attracting Solana Users 

Yakovenko published the code for the new protocol two months after VanEck stated in a report that Hyperliquid was attracting users from the Solana blockchain. Hyperliquid accounted for 35% of all blockchain revenue in July, with the growth coming at the expense of the Solana blockchain. Hyperliquid also ate into the revenue of Ethereum and BNB Chain. 

Hyperliquid’s trading volume also jumped to a new monthly high of $319 million in July, indicating that more cryptocurrency traders are using decentralized exchanges instead of their centralized counterparts.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.