Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, has joined the ranks of crypto founders launching decentralized exchanges (DEXs), following the successes of Hyperliquid and Astar.
This Monday, Yakovenko shared plans for a new sharded perpetual exchange protocol on the Solana blockchain, referred to as Percolator.
A perpetual exchange is a decentralized trading protocol specifically for perpetual futures contracts, enabling traders to speculate on cryptocurrency prices without an expiration date.
Percolator will include two primary on-chain programs: the Router program, which manages collateral, portfolio margins, and cross-slab routing, and the Slab program, a perpetuals engine operated by liquidity providers with “fully self-contained” matching and settlement, as outlined in Yakovenko’s GitHub proposal.
Cointelegraph reached out to the Solana Foundation for comment but had not received a reply by the time of publication.
This development follows Hyperliquid DEX’s recent move to allow third parties to independently launch their own perpetual swap contracts on the platform, after launching the Hyperliquid Improvement Proposal 3 (HIP-3) upgrade on Monday.
This upgrade introduced permissionless, builder-deployed perpetual futures contracts, complete with independent margins and parameters, for users staking at least 500,000 Hyperliquid (HYPE) tokens, currently valued at around $18.2 million.
Related: Hyperliquid whale withdraws $122M HYPE tokens as Arthur Hayes exits
Hyperliquid may be attracting Solana users, says VanEck
Yakovenko’s plans for the new protocol came two months after a VanEck report indicated that Hyperliquid was drawing users away from the Solana blockchain.
In July, Hyperliquid accounted for 35% of total blockchain revenue, with its growth particularly impacting Solana, as well as Ethereum and BNB Chain, VanEck researchers documented in a monthly crypto recap.
“Hyperliquid has successfully attracted high-value users from Solana and has managed to retain them,” stated VanEck’s head of digital assets research, Matthew Sigel, alongside analysts Patrick Bush and Nathan Frankovitz.
Related: Grok, DeepSeek outperform ChatGPT, Gemini with epic crypto market long
Hyperliquid’s trading volume hit a new monthly record of $319 billion in July, indicating a shift of cryptocurrency traders towards DEXs rather than centralized options. It gained traction in April 2024 after introducing spot trading with an aggressive listing strategy and an easy-to-use interface.
On the other hand, rival DEX Astar, which began on Binance’s BNB Chain, has outpaced Hyperliquid to become the leading perp DEX, boasting a daily trading volume of $14.5 billion—nearly tripling Hyperliquid’s 24-hour volume.
Nevertheless, Hyperliquid’s 30-day trading volume of $309 billion is still double that of Astar’s $145 billion over the last month, according to blockchain data platform DefiLlama.
Astar was quietly relisted by the data platform earlier on Monday, weeks after being delisted due to concerns about unverifiable data, as reported by Cointelegraph.
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