Solana Co-Founder Unveils Percolator Perpetual DEX to Challenge Market Leaders
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has unveiled plans for Percolator, a new perpetual decentralized exchange built on the Solana blockchain. The announcement arrives as perpetual DEX platforms continue their remarkable expansion across the cryptocurrency derivatives market.
The project is “implementation-ready” according to detailed technical documentation published on GitHub on October 19, signaling that development has progressed significantly. Yakovenko’s direct involvement marks a strategic push to recapture market share that Solana has lost to competing platforms.
Why Solana’s Co-Founder Built a Perpetual DEX
A VanEck report revealed that Hyperliquid successfully attracted high-value users from Solana by offering a streamlined and effective trading experience. This user migration appears to have motivated Yakovenko to respond with his own solution.
Perpetual futures DEX volumes topped $1 trillion in September 2025, setting a new record. These platforms now command approximately 26% of the entire crypto derivatives market. The sector has grown 530% throughout 2025, creating a massive opportunity for new entrants.
Percolator aims to leverage Solana’s high-throughput architecture to deliver competitive performance. The timing aligns with increased demand for decentralized perpetual trading options that offer users control over their collateral.
How Percolator’s Sharded Architecture Works
The protocol introduces “sharded matching engines” that split the DEX’s order book into multiple small, independent engines that run in parallel. These mini-engines, called “slabs,” each handle separate order books for different tokens.
The architecture consists of two main on-chain programs. The Router program manages collateral, portfolio margins, and cross-slab routing. Meanwhile, the Slab program functions as a perpetual engine run by liquidity providers with fully self-contained matching and settlement.
This design allows liquidity providers to compete while maintaining isolated risk. Users can track positions, manage collateral, and calculate profit and loss through the onchain routing program. The sharded model boosts throughput while enabling liquidity providers to innovate independently within defined safety boundaries.
Yakovenko wrote that the design “keeps each LP’s slab fully self-contained and innovable, while the Router guarantees atomic routing, portfolio netting, and capability-scoped safety”. The testing matrix ensures that no single malicious or buggy slab can impact users who never interacted with it.
Percolator DEX Development Status and Launch Timeline
Core data structures, including Router and Slab, memory pools, and order book systems, are “completed,” while aspects like Percolator’s liquidation engine remain on the “to do” list. At least two external developers have already submitted pull requests to contribute to the project.
Yakovenko revealed he used Claude AI to help generate and test code, clarifying on social media that he was “just messing around with Claude to see how well it can generate” the protocol. He encouraged others to “steal the idea,” demonstrating an open-source approach.
No official launch date has been announced. While the implementation-ready designation suggests advanced development, critical components still need work before a mainnet launch. The project’s open-source nature means other developers could build competing implementations or contribute improvements.
Perpetual DEX Market Competition Intensifies
Hyperliquid currently dominates with approximately 70% of the perpetual DEX market share and maintains over $280 billion in monthly trading volume. The platform’s HYPE token reached a market cap of $16.38 billion, placing it among the top 15 cryptocurrencies globally.
Competing platforms are also gaining traction. Aster on BNB Chain and other emerging protocols are vying for market position. The competitive landscape suggests that multiple platforms will coexist, each offering unique features and trade-offs.
For Solana, Percolator represents an opportunity to reclaim momentum in DeFi infrastructure. A dedicated native perpetual DEX could attract liquidity and derivatives traders who currently favor other blockchains. Even capturing a modest market share from the $1 trillion monthly volume could generate significant activity for the Solana ecosystem.
Percolator’s Potential Impact on Solana
Market observers note that Solana has been consolidating around the $190-200 price range. Technical analysts identify potential for upward momentum if key developments like Percolator gain traction and adoption.
The protocol’s architecture is optimized for parallelism and fault isolation, which are critical for sustaining high throughput on Solana. Token positions, balances, and profit-and-loss calculations remain fully onchain, making them auditable and composable with other Solana programs.
Whether Percolator can compete against Hyperliquid’s first-mover advantage and Aster’s backing remains to be seen. However, Solana’s technical capabilities and Yakovenko’s deep involvement give the project a fighting chance in the competitive perpetual DEX space.
Conclusion
The open-source development approach may accelerate innovation. By encouraging other developers to build on the concept, Yakovenko prioritizes proving that Solana can support competitive perpetual trading over maintaining exclusive control.
