Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko announced on October 20, 2025, the development of Percolator, a sharded perpetual decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol built on the Solana blockchain. This move comes amid growing competition in the DEX space, particularly from platforms like Hyperliquid and Aster.
Percolator is designed as a perpetual exchange for trading futures contracts without expiration dates, and it will consist of two main 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. Yakovenko outlined these details in a GitHub proposal, emphasizing the protocol's aim to leverage Solana's high throughput and low fees for an enhanced user experience.
The announcement follows a VanEck report from August 2025, which noted that Hyperliquid had been attracting high-value users from Solana, as well as Ethereum and BNB Chain. In July, Hyperliquid captured 35% of all blockchain revenue, with trading volume hitting a monthly high of $319 billion. Meanwhile, Aster, launched on BNB Chain, recently surpassed Hyperliquid in daily trading volume at $14.5 billion, though Hyperliquid's 30-day volume of $309 billion remains double that of Aster's $145 billion.
This development positions Percolator as a potential competitor to existing DEXs, aiming to reclaim Solana's user base and drive further innovation in decentralized finance (DeFi). Cointelegraph reached out to the Solana Foundation for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
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