Key Takeaways:
- New on-chain perps DEX: Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is building Percolator, a self-custodial perpetuals exchange on Solana.
- Performance-first design: Percolator introduces “sharded matching engines” and token-specific “slabs” to route orders in parallel while keeping portfolio margin netting.
- Build status: Core data structures (Router, Slab, order book/mempools) are documented as implementation-ready on GitHub; liquidation logic and other modules remain on the to-do list.
Open-source activity points to a new high-performance perp DEX brewing on Solana. Named Percolator, the protocol is being designed by co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko as a fully on-chain, self-custodial exchange with a matching architecture tailored for Solana’s parallel execution model.
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What Percolator Is and Isn’t
Percolator aims to be a decentralized perpetual futures exchange where users custody their own collateral and manage positions entirely on chain. The design centers on two programs:
- Router: The portfolio brain, tracks positions, calculates portfolio margin, manages collateral, and executes atomic routing across markets.
- Slabs: Independent, token-scoped order books that compete for flow and can evolve without breaking the rest of the system.
Unlike monolithic DEXs that use a single matching engine for all markets, Percolator intends to distribute order-matching across many “slabs” and let the Router stitch user intent together with atomic settlement.
How the Architecture Works
Percolator’s architecture is optimized for parallelism and fault isolation, key to sustaining high throughput on Solana.
Sharded Matching Engines and “Slabs”
- Sharded engines: Each slab acts like a small, independent matching engine dedicated to a specific market or asset. These engines can run in parallel, boosting throughput and reducing contention during busy periods.
- Selective routing: The Router looks across slabs to net portfolio exposure and route orders atomically, targeting execution quality while preserving account safety constraints.
- Blast-radius control: Because slabs are isolated, a buggy or malicious slab cannot contaminate users who never interacted with it; the Router’s capability scoping limits cross-component risk.
- Capital efficiency: The docs are pursuing collective capital efficiency on par with that of a single engine, typically with improved price discovery as a result of competitive slabs fighting for order flow.
Self-Custody, Margin, and Risk Controls
Percolator is self-custodial by design: users deposit collateral on-chain and trade via the Router. The design aims at:
- Portfolio margining: Setting off long/short exposure across markets for the most efficient use of collateral.
- Transparent state: The token positions, balances and PnL are all on-chain which makes it auditable and composable with other Solana programmes.
- Deterministic settlement: Atomic routing guarantees that either all legs of a transaction are successful or none, preventing partial fills and violations of margin requirements.
What’s Built vs. What’s Next
According to the public repository documentation:
- Completed/implementation-ready: Core data structures (Router and Slab), memory pools, order book scaffolding, and primary operations.
- Outstanding items: Liquidation engine, some risk and monitoring modules, and end-to-end integrations still outstanding.
- Community activity: At least two external contributors have made pull requests, indicating early developer interest.
There is no public launch date. The repo suggests the design has progressed beyond the whiteboard stage, but final components (especially liquidations) must be finished and tested before a safe mainnet debut.
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