Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, has revealed plans for a new decentralized exchange (DEX), continuing the trend initiated by Hyperliquid and Astar’s recent triumphs.
On Monday, Yakovenko outlined a new sharded perpetual exchange protocol on the Solana blockchain, called Percolator.
A perpetual exchange enables decentralized trading of perpetual futures contracts, allowing traders to speculate on cryptocurrency prices indefinitely.
Percolator will feature two primary on-chain programs: the Router program, which oversees collateral, portfolio margins, and cross-slab routing, and the Slab program, a perpetuals engine operated by liquidity providers, featuring “fully self-contained” matching and settlement as detailed in Yakovenko’s GitHub proposal.
Cointelegraph contacted the Solana Foundation for comments but had not received a reply by the publication time.
This announcement follows Hyperliquid DEX’s recent move to allow third parties to launch their own perpetual swap contracts independently after introducing the Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3 (HIP-3) upgrade on Monday.
The upgrade introduced permissionless, builder-deployed perpetual futures contracts with independent margins and parameters for users staked with at least 500,000 Hyperliquid (HYPE) tokens, valued around $18.2 million at press time.
Related: Hyperliquid whale withdraws $122M HYPE tokens as Arthur Hayes exits
Hyperliquid may be attracting Solana users, says VanEck
Yakovenko’s protocol plans were shared two months after a VanEck report indicated that Hyperliquid is drawing users away from the Solana blockchain.
In July, Hyperliquid captured 35% of all blockchain revenue, notably at the expense of Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, as noted by VanEck researchers in a monthly crypto recap report.
“Hyperliquid has attracted high-value users from Solana and has managed to retain them,” stated VanEck’s head of digital assets research, Matthew Sigel, along with analysts Patrick Bush and Nathan Frankovitz.
Related: Grok, DeepSeek outperform ChatGPT, Gemini with epic crypto market long
Hyperliquid reached a record monthly trading volume of $319 billion in July, indicating that more cryptocurrency traders prefer DEXs over centralized options. It gained traction in April 2024 after initiating spot trading coupled with an aggressive listing strategy and user-friendly design.
Meanwhile, competitor DEX Aster, which launched on Binance’s BNB Chain, has overtaken Hyperliquid to become the top perpetual DEX with a daily trading volume of $14.5 billion, nearly tripling Hyperliquid’s 24-hour volume.
However, Hyperliquid’s 30-day trading volume of $309 billion remains double that of Aster’s $145 billion over the same period, according to blockchain data platform DefiLlama.
Aster was quietly reinstated by the data platform earlier on Monday, weeks after being delisted due to unverified opaque data, as reported by Cointelegraph.
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