Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, has revealed a new decentralized exchange (DEX) called Percolator. The platform is designed as a sharded perpetual futures protocol built directly on the Solana blockchain.
Percolator aims to provide a self-custodial and high-speed solution for perpetual trading, allowing users to speculate on price movements without expiry dates.
Documentation Released on GitHub
The documentation for Percolator is now public on GitHub and described as “implementation-ready.” It outlines two main components — the Router and the Slab program.
The Router manages collateral, portfolio margins, and routes orders between slabs. Each Slab acts as a standalone matching engine operated by liquidity providers, enabling independent settlement and fault isolation. This design ensures that any issue in one slab does not affect the entire system.
Yakovenko explained that the Router guarantees atomic routing and portfolio netting. This allows each liquidity provider’s slab to remain self-contained and customizable.
The repository already contains completed order book and memory pool structures. However, liquidation and governance modules are still in progress. There is no official launch date yet, but developers contributing to the project describe it as “deep in testing.”
Competition in the Perpetual DEX Market
Percolator enters an increasingly competitive sector of decentralized finance. Hyperliquid (HYPE), a perpetual DEX, currently leads the space after introducing permissionless builder-deployed perpetual contracts through its HIP-3 upgrade. The feature allows users to stake at least 500,000 HYPE tokens, roughly $18 million, to launch their own perpetual markets with independent margin rules.
According to a VanEck report, Hyperliquid accounted for 35% of all blockchain revenue in July 2025. Specifically, it drew high-value traders from Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain. By comparison, Solana’s derivatives activity remains limited, with most on-chain volume concentrated in spot trading and lending platforms.
Percolator’s sharded slab architecture separates markets into multiple self-contained engines. This reduces latency and risk from systemic failures. The Router layer allows cross-slab margining, improving capital efficiency by letting traders offset positions across different markets.
Built entirely on Solana, the protocol benefits from the network’s parallel transaction processing and high throughput. These are both essential for high-frequency derivatives trading.
Impact on Solana’s DeFi Ecosystem
It is not yet clear whether the Solana Foundation will formally support Percolator or treat it as an independent, community-led project. If launched successfully, the protocol could expand Solana’s decentralized finance offerings. These offerings already include lending platforms, options markets, and tokenized asset protocols.
Additionally, developers close to the project have suggested that a testnet launch may be near once the liquidation and risk systems are finalized.
Moreover, the introduction of Percolator comes as SOL, the native token of the Solana network, trades under pressure following recent market volatility. As of this writing, SOL to USD is trading around $187, down 2.5% in 24 hours and 3.4 % over the past week.
