Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko is developing a new decentralized perpetual futures exchange protocol named Percolator, designed to run natively on the Solana blockchain. The project was described as “implementation-ready” in documentation published to GitHub on October 19.
Percolator is built as a self-custodial, onchain perpetuals DEX, introducing an advanced routing program that allows traders to track positions, manage collateral, and calculate portfolio margin directly on-chain. The design also debuts an innovative architecture based on “slabs,” or separate order books dedicated to individual tokens.
These slabs form the backbone of Percolator’s “sharded matching engine” system, which divides liquidity across multiple small, independent engines that operate in parallel, a setup that boosts competition among liquidity providers while improving scalability.
Yakovenko explained that this approach ensures atomic routing and portfolio netting, while maintaining isolation between slabs for enhanced safety. “Each LP’s slab is fully self-contained and innovable,” he noted, adding that the design “ensures no single buggy or malicious slab can affect others, achieving monolithic-level efficiency with superior execution quality.”
If successfully deployed, Percolator could become a cornerstone of Solana’s expanding DeFi infrastructure, offering high-performance derivatives trading with decentralized control, fine-grained risk management, and unmatched throughput on-chain.
