Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

In the Perp DEX space, despite the continuous evolution of liquidity and user interface, DEXs have always struggled to fully match CEXs in terms of latency and throughput due to limitations in the consensus mechanism and block generation time of the underlying public chain.

Bulk Trade has taken a different approach, choosing a technical route that differs from conventional Perp DEXs: delving into the underlying infrastructure and attempting to build a trading layer that combines centralized-level matching speed with decentralized settlement capabilities by customizing the Solana validator client architecture.

What's their background?

According to official disclosures, Bulk raised $8 million in its seed round, led by 6th Man Ventures and Robot Ventures. Other investors included market maker Windtermute, Chapter One, Mirana Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and angel investors Anatoly Yakovenko (Toly, co-founder of Solana) and Ceteris, head of research at Delphi Digital.

Bulk's two co-founders are quite active in the crypto community:

• Co-founder and CEO Kobie McGlashan: He co-founded Web3 recruitment and consulting company BEExperience in February 2022 and served as its CEO. From April to August 2022, he served as Vice President of Marketing and Development at Orderly Network. Prior to that, he served as Regional Control Manager at the British telecommunications giant Openreach.
• Junaid Peer, co-founder and CTO, describes himself as an "orderbook oligarch" and is the co-founder of Bulk. His public profile indicates long-term involvement in building order book-related systems, but detailed professional experience is limited in public channels, primarily focusing on the Bulk project. He has approximately 9,300 followers on the X platform, with his content mainly revolving around discussions of trading infrastructure and the Solana ecosystem.

What is the core architecture?

The Solana blockchain relies on numerous validators. Bulk did not start from scratch; instead, it was built on Bulk-Agave, a fork of the mainstream Solana validator client Jito-agave, and equipped the validators with a dedicated plugin—Bulk Tile. This plugin can run in parallel with the validators' original work, specifically handling key logic such as order matching and the liquidation engine, significantly improving processing efficiency.

In simple terms, BULK exchange's order propagation logic allows users to start trading after depositing funds on the Solana chain. Orders are imported through the BULK Net propagation layer, where they are first split into 8 smaller shards. Any validator can reconstruct the original order by acquiring any 6 shards. Then, BULK uses the UDP protocol to ensure that core nodes "receive and forward, only transmitting small shards," which solves the packet loss problem in high-frequency trading and significantly improves propagation speed.

Then comes the issue of order matching. BULK's order matching isn't done arbitrarily, but rather at a fixed rhythm—a "matching tick" is triggered every 20 milliseconds. All orders are sorted according to a fixed rule calculated using "public key, random number, and matching tick number," and all nodes produce results according to the same rule. There is no central authority or manipulation, preventing front-running and ensuring fairness as much as possible. The only factor truly determining order priority is the matching tick that the order enters the system for.

In addition, Bulk also has a self-trading prevention (STP) function. For market makers and professional quantitative traders, they often place orders at the best bid and ask prices at the same time, which can easily trigger self-trading unintentionally. This mechanism can effectively protect these professional traders.

The final step in the entire transaction process is final confirmation and settlement. BULK first uses fast economic confirmation of 25-40 milliseconds to meet the speed requirements of high-frequency trading, allowing traders to act immediately; then it synchronizes the transaction results to Solana to complete the final on-chain settlement confirmation.

What are the characteristics of Bulk?

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

In terms of speed, according to Delphi Digital, Bulk refreshes prices faster, provides more realistic liquidity, and is more cost-efficient. While typical trading platforms in the Solana ecosystem refresh every 400 milliseconds, Bulk updates asynchronously every 20 milliseconds, completely decoupling from block generation. Furthermore, order placers on other platforms may cancel their orders before execution, creating artificial liquidity. Bulk requires orders to be valid until the order placer actively cancels them; the liquidity seen is the actual liquidity that can be traded. For settlement, Bulk uses a price-priority, time-priority rule, with orders executed sequentially based on arrival order.

Bulk states that its platform's gas-free order placement, along with the use of APIs and CCXT, simplifies the user experience and eliminates blockchain complexity for traders. Furthermore, Bulk further reduces transaction costs through batch order processing.

Regarding security, Bulk stated, "There is no need to entrust assets to the platform for custody, no need for cross-chain or sorting machines, there is no risk of the platform running away or misappropriating funds, and there are no security vulnerabilities and centralization risks that are common in cross-chain and layer-2 solutions."

In addition, validators can run BULK's transaction logic without giving up the MEV revenue generated by Jito block space auctions, and can also profit from Bulk's order book order flow, forming a virtuous cycle of ecosystem incentives.

summary

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

Currently, Bulk Trade is in its closed beta phase and will soon launch its public testnet. As the public testnet approaches, we will continue to observe whether this high-performance trading platform can change the competitive landscape of on-chain derivatives.