Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is designing a perps DEX: GitHub

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko appears to be designing a high-performance decentralized perpetual futures exchange protocol called Percolator, naturally built on the Solana blockchain. 

The project is “implementation-ready” according to GitHub documentation published on Oct. 19. 

Percolator is a self-custodial, onchain perps DEX. The protocol appears to feature an onchain routing program that will enable users to track their positions, manage their collateral, and calculate their portfolio margin. It also introduces “slabs,” which appear to be separate order books for separate tokens. 

Slabs look like a unique feature of Percolator, designed to boost competition among liquidity providers using “sharded matching engines” that split the DEX’s order book into multiple small, independent engines that run in parallel.

“This design keeps each LP’s slab fully self-contained and innovable, while the Router guarantees atomic routing, portfolio netting, and capability-scoped safety,” Yakovenko wrote. “The testing matrix ensures no single malicious or buggy slab can impact users who never interacted with it, and that aggregate capital efficiency matches a monolithic DEX — often with better execution quality via selective routing.”

It is unclear when Percolator will launch, though the development process appears to be far along, according to the project’s GitHub. The “core data structures,” i.e., Router and Slab, memory pools, order book systems, among other key operations, are “completed,” while other aspects like Percolator’s liquidation engine remain on the “to do” list. 

At least two developers have posted pull requests to contribute to Percolator.

This is a developing story and may be updated as The Block learns more.