Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

In the realm of Perp DEX, despite the continuous evolution of liquidity and user interfaces, DEXs have always struggled to fully match CEXs in terms of latency and throughput due to the limitations of the consensus mechanisms and block generation times of public blockchains.

Bulk Trade has taken a different approach, choosing a technical route that diverges from conventional Perp DEXs: delving deep into the underlying infrastructure, it attempts to build a trading layer that combines centralized-level matching speed with decentralized settlement capabilities through a customized Solana validator client architecture.

What’s the background?

According to official disclosures, Bulk raised $8 million in its seed round, led by 6th Man Ventures and Robot Ventures, with other participants including market makers Wintermute, Chapter One, Mirana Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, as well as angel investors Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly, co-founder of Solana) and Ceteris, research director at Delphi Digital.

The two co-founders of Bulk are quite active in the crypto community:

• Co-founder and CEO Kobie McGlashan: Co-founded the Web3 recruitment and consulting firm BEExperience in February 2022 and served as CEO. From April to August 2022, he was the Vice President of Marketing and Development at Orderly Network, and previously held the position of Regional Control Manager at British telecom giant Openreach.
• Co-founder and CTO Junaid Peer: Self-described as an "orderbook oligarch," he is a co-founder of Bulk. His public information shows long-term involvement in building orderbook-related systems, but detailed career history is relatively limited in public channels, mainly showcasing content centered around the Bulk project. He has about 9,300 followers on the X platform, with content primarily discussing trading infrastructure and the Solana ecosystem.

How is the core architecture?

The operation of the Solana blockchain relies on numerous "validators." Bulk did not start from scratch but built on the mainstream Solana validator client Jito-agave's branch, Bulk-Agave, and equipped the validators with a dedicated plugin—Bulk Tile. This plugin runs in parallel with the validator's original work, specifically responsible for key logic such as order matching and clearing engines, significantly enhancing processing efficiency.

Regarding the order propagation logic of the BULK exchange, simply put, users can start trading as soon as they deposit funds on the Solana chain. Orders are imported through the BULK Net propagation layer, where they are first split into 8 small shards; any validator can restore the original order by obtaining any 6 of them. Then, BULK uses the UDP protocol to let core nodes "receive and forward immediately, only transmitting small shards," which not only solves the packet loss problem in high-frequency trading but also significantly increases propagation speed.

Next is the order matching issue. BULK's order matching does not happen at any time but follows a fixed rhythm—triggering a "matching cycle (tick)" every 20 milliseconds. All orders are sorted according to a fixed rule calculated by "public key, random number, matching cycle number," with all nodes producing results based on the same rule, eliminating centralization and manipulation, thus preventing front-running and striving for fairness. The only factor that truly determines order priority is the matching cycle in which the order enters the system.

In addition, Bulk will have a self-trade prevention (STP) feature. For market makers and professional quantitative traders, they often place orders on both the buy and sell sides simultaneously, which can easily trigger self-trades unintentionally. This mechanism effectively protects such professional traders.

The entire trading process culminates in final confirmation and settlement. BULK first uses a rapid economic confirmation of 25-40 milliseconds to meet the speed requirements of high-frequency trading, allowing traders to operate immediately; then it synchronizes the trading results to Solana, completing the final on-chain settlement confirmation.

What are the features of Bulk?

The Bulk trading system is built around the central limit order book (CLOB) of each perpetual contract market. All contracts are settled with USDC as margin.

In terms of speed, according to Delphi Digital, Bulk refreshes prices faster, has more genuine liquidity, and is more cost-efficient. Ordinary trading platforms in the Solana ecosystem refresh every 400 milliseconds, while Bulk updates asynchronously every 20 milliseconds, completely decoupled from block generation; additionally, order placers on other platforms may withdraw orders before execution, creating false liquidity. Bulk requires that orders must be valid until the order placer actively cancels them, meaning the liquidity seen is what can actually be executed; in terms of settlement, Bulk adopts price priority and time priority rules, with orders executed in the order they arrive.

Bulk states that its platform allows for gas-free order placement and the use of APIs and CCXT, simplifying the user experience and eliminating the complexity of blockchain for traders. Furthermore, Bulk compresses trading costs by processing orders in batches.

In terms of security, Bulk claims, "there's no need to entrust assets to the platform, no cross-chain or sequencer risks, and no risk of platform collapse or fund misappropriation, nor the common security vulnerabilities and centralization risks present in cross-chain and layer two solutions."

Additionally, for validators, while running BULK's trading logic, they do not forfeit the MEV earnings generated from Jito's block space auctions and can profit from Bulk's order book order flow, creating a positive ecological incentive mechanism.

Conclusion

Bulk Trade represents another attempt to build a high-performance derivatives trading platform on Solana. By integrating the matching engine into validator nodes, the project aims to achieve performance close to centralized exchanges while maintaining decentralization.

Currently, Bulk Trade is in the internal testing phase and will soon open a public testnet. As the public testnet approaches, whether this high-performance trading platform can change the competitive landscape of on-chain derivatives remains to be seen.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。