Quick Look Bulk: Solana's Latest Perp DEX Bet?

Financing news retweeted by Solana official Twitter, is Bulk disrupting decentralized perpetual contract exchanges?

Written by: Alex Liu, Foresight News

On September 24, 2025, Bulk, a decentralized perpetual contract exchange in the SOL ecosystem, announced the completion of an $8 million seed round, with the financing news retweeted by Solana’s official Twitter account.

Financing Details

This round was co-led by 6th Man Ventures and Robot Ventures, with participation from institutions such as Wintermute, Big Brain Holdings, and individuals including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

This follows a $500,000 angel round completed in August 2024. Investors have high expectations for the Bulk team’s potential to achieve a balance between CEX-level performance and decentralization. Mike Dudas, managing partner of 6th Man Ventures, stated that Bulk is expected to become one of the leading perpetual contract trading platforms in the Solana ecosystem.

Protocol Mechanism

Bulk Trade (abbreviated as BULK) is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform deployed on the Solana blockchain, aiming to provide users with a high-performance trading experience similar to centralized exchanges, while maintaining decentralization and censorship resistance.

The project’s vision is summarized as “One Exchange, Infinite Markets,” emphasizing comprehensive support for various trading markets. Bulk is committed to achieving “colocation-grade” matching performance through an innovative embedded matching layer architecture, without sacrificing core principles such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and permissionless access.

From a protocol design perspective, a key innovation of BULK is integrating the matching engine into Solana validator nodes. The Bulk team forked the Solana validator client (based on jito-agave) and developed a client called Bulk-Agave, which internally integrates a matching sidecar called Bulk-Tile.

Under this architecture, user-submitted orders do not go through Solana’s general transaction queue but are processed directly within Bulk-Tile. This means matching can be completed in about 20ms asynchronously, and instant trade finality can be achieved in about 40ms. The entire trading process is gasless, with only the platform’s own matching fees charged. In addition, Bulk achieves extremely high throughput, reportedly supporting millions of order matches per second. Through this design, Bulk provides a low-latency and high-precision pricing environment for both market makers and high-frequency traders.

To ensure trading fairness, Bulk strictly enforces the first-in-first-out (FIFO) principle during matching and uses cryptographic sorting keys to eliminate any potential front-running or reordering risks. Users do not need to pay any additional network fees when submitting orders; the platform only charges exchange fees.

All user assets are always retained on the Solana chain in the form of SPL tokens, stored in user-specific programmable accounts, without the need for any cross-chain bridges or external networks, thus avoiding cross-chain risks and fragmentation issues. Bulk emphasizes its trading system as “No sequencers. No bridges.”, reflecting a decentralized design philosophy.

Bulk’s architecture also establishes a positive incentive cycle with the Solana network: when users trade on Bulk, a portion of each transaction fee (defined by the protocol as 12.5%) is returned to validator nodes running the Bulk-Agave client. In this way, validators running Bulk nodes can earn additional revenue (estimated to increase annualized returns by about 1-2%), thereby enhancing the economic incentives of the entire Solana validator network. The Bulk team believes this move can encourage more validators to participate in supporting Bulk’s operations while increasing the overall yield of the Solana ecosystem.

BULK claims its trading platform is a “block-less, leader-less, geographically distributed CLOB exchange.” In other words, Bulk does not rely on centralized matching roles but is jointly maintained by a distributed cluster of Solana validators, avoiding potential issues of single-point control or trade censorship. This decentralized design, combined with fast matching performance, makes Bulk promising for meeting both institutional and retail demand for high-performance markets while maintaining the security and openness of a decentralized exchange.

Team Information

Bulk’s core team is small and headquartered in the UK. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Kobie McGlashan, has a rich background in blockchain entrepreneurship, having founded a blockchain recruitment company and participated in the creation of the Solana project accelerator SuperteamUK.

CTO Junaid Peer is an experienced blockchain engineer who has been involved in early crypto project development since his youth.

How to Participate

Bulk has now launched its Alphanet testnet, and users can try it out via the official link. The testnet already supports perpetual contract trading for mainstream asset pairs, including BTC/USD, ETH/USD, SOL/USD, etc. (all offering up to 20x leverage). Participants only need to use a common Solana wallet and deposit the corresponding SPL assets to start simulated trading, with no need for cross-chain bridges or extra accounts.

Bulk also provides documentation and APIs for developers (including CCXT, FIX, and other interfaces) to facilitate quick integration with the test environment for various traders and institutions. The team also recommends following its official social channels for the latest updates and guides.