Solana Labs CEO Plans New DEX to Rival Hyperliquid and Astar

Yakovenko Outlines New platform Design

Solana Labs co-founder and chief executive Anatoly Yakovenko has published technical plans for a decentralized platform called Percolator, a sharded perpetuals protocol built directly on the Solana blockchain. The design aims to create a self-custodial, high-speed platform for perpetual futures — instruments that allow crypto traders to speculate on price movements without expiry.

Documentation posted to GitHub describes Percolator as “implementation-ready.” It introduces two core programs: a Router, which handles collateral, portfolio margins, and cross-slab routing, and a Slab program — a matching engine managed by liquidity providers. Each slab runs independently, with what Yakovenko calls “fully self-contained matching and settlement.”

“This design keeps each LP’s slab fully self-contained and innovable, while the Router guarantees atomic routing, portfolio netting, and capability-scoped securety,” Yakovenko wrote. “No single malicious or buggy slab can impact users who never interacted with it.”

The project’s data structures for order books and memory pools, while work on liquidation systems remains ongoing. At least two developers have contributed pull requests to the codebase. No launch date has been announced.

Investor Takeaway

Context: Hyperliquid’s Rapid Growth

The proposal comes as rival Hyperliquid continues to expand its footprint. The derivatives-focused DEX recently rolled out permissionless, builder-deployed perpetual contracts through its HIP-3 upgrade. The stake at least 500,000 HYPE tokens — around $18 million — to launch their own perps markets with independent margin rules.

According to a VanEck report, Hyperliquid accounted for 35% of all blockchain revenue in July, drawing users away from Solana, ETH, and BNB Chain. “Hyperliquid has poached high-value users from Solana and has retained them,” wrote Matthew Sigel, VanEck’s head of , alongside Patrick Bush and Nathan Frankovitz. The firm cited its “simple, highly functional product” as a key driver of retention.

reached $309 billion last month, according to DefiLlama, double that of its nearest rival Aster. Its all-time monthly peak came in July with $319 billion traded. That surge followed April’s , which assisted the platform compete with centralized rivals by offering quicker listings and lower latency.

Percolator’s Competitive Edge

Percolator’s architecture centers on “sharded matching engines,” effectively splitting the platform into smaller, parallel order books that process transactions independently. The approach is designed to reduce congestion while maintaining global price consistency across assets. The Router module aggregates these fragments, ensuring margin accounting and trade settlement occur atomically.

The system could address one of DeFi’s lingering issues: performance bottlenecks in onchain order matching. offers an advantage for such an experiment, especially as Layer 1 competitors push similar scalability upgrades.

The foundation has not yet whether Percolator will receive formal ecosystem support or launch as a community-led protocol.

Investor Takeaway

Race Among Decentralized Perp platforms

Perpetual futures have become one of DeFi’s most active trading segments. Aster, a BNB Chain-based DEX, has recently overtaken Hyperliquid by daily volume, reaching $14.5 billion in 24-hour trades — nahead triple Hyperliquid’s at the time. However, Hyperliquid still leads on a monthly basis and remains the benchmark for decentralized derivatives infrastructure.

Percolator’s emergence reflects Solana’s bid to reassert itself in that race. If successful, it would add to a growing list of native financial primitives , from decentralized options and lending protocols to tokenized asset platforms. The project also signals Yakovenko’s continued hands-on role in product development — an uncommon founder at this stage of network maturity.

For now, the code remains under active review on GitHub. Developers following the repository describe the project as “deep in testing,” suggesting a launch could follow once the liquidation and governance components are finalized.