Solana Co-Founder Unveils Percolator To Rival Aster, Hyperliquid

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has unveiled Percolator, a new “implementation-ready” decentralized perpetual exchange protocol built to take on Aster and Hyperliquid in the fast-growing perp DEX market.

According to its GitHub repository, Percolator is a technical blueprint for a sharded perpetual futures DEX designed to boost trading speed and efficiency. The system is nearing stress testing, though some core processes, including account validation and funding rates, have not been finalized.

The move comes as Solana’s perpetual DEX volumes have slumped more than 28% in the past week, trailing rivals that have captured most of the sector’s liquidity.

Solana perp volume (Source: DefiLlama)

“Hyperliquid has poached high-value users from Solana and has retained them,” said Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, referencing a report that found traders shifting toward the rival exchange.

Some analysts say Yakovenko’s latest project marks a bid to reclaim lost ground.

DEX Perp Volumes Surge

Over the past month, volumes across the DEX perp sector soared to $1.186 trillion, with Off Chain, zkLighter, and Hyperliquid facilitating the most activity.

From a protocol perspective, the three-best performers are Lighter, Aster, and Hyperliquid. Lighter leads with $244.605 billion in trading volumes in the past month and around $10.149 billion activity in the past 24 hours.

Aster, which was launched on the BNB Chain and is backed by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, has seen approximately $155.244 billion in trading volumes over the past month and about $9.953 billion in the last 24 hours.

Hyperliquid is the third most popular perp DEX platform with its volumes over the past 24 hours standing at $8.064 billion. It did, however, outperform Lighter and Aster in recent monthly activity, with its volumes reaching $313.244 billion over the past thirty days, more than double the volumes seen by Aster.

Solana trading volumes stand at $63.9 billion in the past month.

I love this metric.
You can see the difference in volume from the first Hyperliquid season, season 1.5, pts season 2, secret season 2.5, and then no points season.

And yet, the no points period has still generated a ton of volume just because the product, the whole of… pic.twitter.com/qmNoULpcWk

— Artommy (@Artommy_) October 21, 2025

Hyperliquid May Be Attracting Solana Users, VanEck Says

Yakovenko’s plans for a new protocol were unveiled two months after a VanEck report claimed that Hyperliquid was attracting users from the Solana ecosystem.

In July, Hyperliquid earned 35% of all blockchain revenue. Its growth came mainly at the expense of Solana, Ethereum, and BNB Chain, researchers led  by Sigel at VanEck wrote in a monthly crypto recap report. 

That’s after Hyperliquid’s trading volume reached a new monthly high of $319 billion in July, signaling that traders are choosing to use decentralized exchanges instead of their centralized counterparts.

Percolator Protocol Will Consist Of Two Parts

According to the project’s Github repository, the Percolator protocol will consist of two main parts. These are the “Router” program and the “Slab” program.

The router program will function as the main brain or coordinator in the system. It will handle functionality such as where collateral is stored, tracking the total risks across all trades, ensuring trades go to the correct market shard, and managing small, temporary permissions that will allow certain actions for a brief period.

Meanwhile, the slab program will serve as an engine for each trading market. Each of the slabs will run independently and will handle their specific market’s order book, matching engines, tracking positions, and risk rules for margin and liquidations. 

One of the main features of the Percolator protocol is that it will split markets into multiple smaller units called shards. This approach makes the overall system faster and avoids congestion.

The protocol will also include memory efficiency. Each market will use up to 10 MB, and there will also be limits on how many accounts, orders, and trades it can hold.

The Github repository shows that pool sizes have been fine tuned to fit within 10 MB, with the number of accounts capped at 5,000, orders at 30,000, positions at 30,000, reservations at 4,000, slices at 16,000, trades at 10,000, instruments at 32, DLP accounts at 100, and aggressor entries at 4,000.

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