Seed round financing of $8 million, what gives Bulk Trade the confidence to break into the Perp DEX red ocean?

Title: “Gold Rush Manual | Why Does Bulk Trade Gain Toly’s Favor?”

Author: KarenZ

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

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

What’s the background?

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

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

· Co-founder and CEO Kobie McGlashan: In February 2022, he co-founded Web3 recruitment and consulting firm BEExperience and served as CEO. From April to August 2022, he was VP of marketing and development at Orderly Network. Previously, he also worked as a regional control manager at UK telecom giant Openreach.

· Co-founder and CTO Junaid Peer: Self-described as an “orderbook oligarch,” he is a co-founder of Bulk. Public information shows he has long been involved in building order book-related systems, but detailed career history is limited, mainly centered around the Bulk project. He has about 9,300 followers on X platform, with content mainly discussing trading infrastructure and Solana ecosystem topics.

What about the core architecture?

The Solana blockchain relies on numerous “validators.” Bulk did not reinvent the wheel but built upon the mainstream Solana validator client Jito-agave, creating a branch called Bulk-Agave, and equipped validators with a dedicated plugin—Bulk Tile. This plugin runs alongside the validator’s original functions, responsible for key logic such as order matching and clearing engines, significantly improving processing efficiency.

Regarding the order propagation logic on the BULK trading platform, simply put, trading can begin once users deposit funds on the Solana chain. Orders are propagated through the BULK Net layer, which splits each order into 8 smaller fragments. Any validator that obtains any 6 of these fragments can reconstruct the original order. Then, BULK uses the UDP protocol to have core nodes “receive and forward, only transmitting small fragments,” solving high-frequency trading packet loss issues and greatly increasing propagation speed.

Next is the order matching problem. BULK’s order matching is not continuous but occurs at fixed intervals—triggered every 20 milliseconds as a “matching cycle (tick).” All orders are sorted according to a fixed rule based on “public key, random number, matching cycle number.” All nodes produce results following the same rule, with no central authority or manipulation, preventing front-running and aiming for fairness. The only factor that determines order priority is the matching cycle in which the order enters the system.

Additionally, Bulk has a self-trade prevention (STP) feature. For market makers and professional quantitative traders who often place buy and sell orders simultaneously, this mechanism effectively protects them from accidental self-trades.

The final step in the trading process is confirmation and settlement. BULK first provides a rapid economic confirmation within 25-40 milliseconds to meet high-frequency trading speed requirements, allowing traders to act immediately; then, the trading results are synchronized to Solana for final on-chain settlement confirmation.

What are Bulk’s features?

Bulk’s trading system is built around a central limit order book (CLOB) for each perpetual contract market. All contracts use USDC for margin settlement.

In terms of speed, according to Delphi Digital, Bulk offers faster price updates, more realistic liquidity, and higher cost efficiency. While typical Solana trading platforms refresh every 400 milliseconds, Bulk updates asynchronously every 20 milliseconds, completely decoupled from block production; additionally, other platforms’ order book holders may cancel orders before execution, creating false liquidity. Bulk requires orders to remain valid until explicitly canceled, so the visible liquidity reflects what can actually be traded. For settlement, Bulk uses price-time priority rules, with orders executed sequentially based on arrival time.

Bulk states that its platform eliminates the need for gas fees for order placement, and the use of API and CCXT simplifies user experience, removing blockchain complexity for traders. Moreover, by batch processing orders, Bulk further reduces trading costs.

In terms of security, Bulk claims, “There is no need to entrust assets to the platform, no cross-chain or sequencer reliance, eliminating risks of platform insolvency or fund misappropriation, and avoiding common security vulnerabilities and centralization risks associated with cross-chain and layer-2 solutions.”

Furthermore, for validators, running BULK’s trading logic does not forgo MEV profits generated from Jito block space auctions, and they can also profit from the order flow in Bulk’s order book, creating a healthy ecosystem incentive mechanism.

Summary

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 near-centralized platform performance while maintaining decentralization.

Currently, Bulk Trade is in closed beta 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.