Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, is actively developing Percolator. It is a new decentralized perpetual exchange protocol specifically designed for the Solana blockchain.
Percolator aims to facilitate perpetual futures trading. These are products that allow users to speculate on the price movements of cryptocurrencies without expiration dates. Additionally, they leverage Solana’s high-speed, parallel processing capabilities for improved throughput and efficiency.
Architecture of Percolator
Percolator’s architecture focuses on a sharded matching engine framework, which divides order books and matching logic across multiple independent “slabs.” Each slab operates as a self-contained unit, maintained by liquidity providers. This ensures atomic trade execution and minimizing the contagion risks seen in conventional perpetual DEXs.
This division enables parallel handling of numerous markets and improved execution speed. This is key for high-frequency trading and scaling under Solana’s Sealevel runtime.
A central Router program orchestrates routing, collateral management, portfolio margining, and cross-slab trades. This layer ensures traders can move seamlessly between different slabs without exposure to failures or delays in unrelated markets. The slab system supports innovation and autonomous upgrades, allowing individual liquidity providers to customize match and settle rules for their slabs.
What’s Ahead
The project is still under development, with Yakovenko openly publishing documentation and code on GitHub and encouraging broader community involvement. The GitHub repository currently features finished order book and memory pool structures but has liquidation modules and some core safety features still under construction. Yakovenko’s explicit invitation for others to build upon or even “steal” the idea reflects a strong open-source philosophy and a collective push for rapid DeFi innovation on Solana.
Solana’s perpetual DEX volume has experienced setbacks compared to competitors like Hyperliquid. Percolator hopes to reverse this trend by providing DeFi users and liquidity providers with low-cost, high-performance perpetual trading that rivals centralized exchange products. By offering sharded matching, portfolio netting, and modular upgrade paths, the protocol aims to foster competition and growth across market segments—potentially driving significant increases in transactional and staking demand for SOL tokens.
No official launch date is available yet, but Percolator’s rapid progress and transparent development are attracting attention across both Solana’s developer community and the wider DeFi sector as the project gears up to challenge established perpetual exchanges in 2025.
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