Solana 'Official Twitter retweeted the financing news. Is Bulk disrupting the decentralized perpetual contract exchange market?
By Alex Liu, Foresight News
On September 24, 2025, Bulk, a decentralized perpetual contract exchange within the SOL ecosystem, announced the completion of an $8 million seed round of financing. The financing news was retweeted by Solana’s official Twitter account.
Financing Details
This round of financing was co-led by 6th Man Ventures and Robot Ventures, with participation from institutions such as Wintermute, Big Brain Holdings, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
This follows a $500,000 angel round 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 at 6th Man Ventures, stated that Bulk is poised to become one of the leading perpetual contract trading platforms in the Solana ecosystem.
Protocol Mechanism
Bulk Trade (BULK) is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform deployed on the Solana blockchain. It aims to provide users with a high-performance trading experience similar to that of centralized exchanges while maintaining decentralization and censorship resistance.
The project's vision is summarized as "One Exchange, Infinite Markets," emphasizing comprehensive support for a wide range of trading markets. Bulk strives to achieve colocation-grade matching performance through an innovative architecture with an embedded matching layer, without sacrificing core principles such as decentralization, censorship resistance, and accessibility.
From a protocol design perspective, a key innovation of BULK is the integration of the matching engine into the Solana validator node . The Bulk team forked the Solana validator client (based on jito-agave) to develop Bulk-Agave, which integrates a matching sidecar called Bulk-Tile.
Under this architecture, user orders are processed directly within the Bulk Tile, bypassing Solana's typical transaction queue. This means matching can be completed asynchronously within approximately 20ms, with near-instant finality of approximately 40ms. The entire transaction process is gas-free, with only the platform's own matching fees incurred. Furthermore, Bulk achieves exceptionally high throughput, reportedly supporting millions of orders per second. This design provides both market makers and high-frequency traders with an extremely low latency and highly accurate pricing environment.
To ensure fair trading, Bulk strictly follows the first-in, first-out (FIFO) principle during the matching process and uses encrypted sort keys to eliminate any potential pre-trading or reordering risks. Users do not pay any additional network fees when submitting orders; the platform only charges exchange fees.
All user assets remain on the Solana chain in the form of SPL tokens, stored in user-specific programmable accounts. They do not require any cross-chain bridges or external networks, thus avoiding cross-chain risks and fragmentation. Bulk emphasizes that its trading system has "no dedicated sequencers, no cross-chain bridges," embodying its decentralized design.
Bulk's architecture also creates a positive feedback loop with the Solana network regarding resource incentives: when users trade using Bulk, a portion of each transaction fee (defined by the protocol as 12.5%) is returned to validator nodes running the Bulk-Agave client. This allows validators running Bulk nodes to earn additional revenue (estimated to increase annualized returns by approximately 1-2%), thereby strengthening the economic incentives of the entire Solana validator network. The Bulk team believes this move will encourage more validators to participate in and support Bulk operations, while also increasing profitability for the entire Solana ecosystem.
BULK claims its trading platform is a "blockless, leaderless, geographically distributed CLOB exchange." This means that Bulk doesn't rely on a centralized matchmaker, but rather is maintained by a distributed Solana validator cluster, eliminating potential issues like single points of control or transaction censorship. This decentralized design, coupled with fast matching performance, makes Bulk a promising platform for meeting the high-performance market demands of both institutional and retail investors, while maintaining the security and openness of a decentralized exchange.
Team Information
Bulk has a small core team and is headquartered in the UK. Co-founder and CEO Kobie McGlashan has extensive blockchain entrepreneurial experience, having previously founded a blockchain recruitment firm and participated in the creation of the Solana project accelerator, SuperteamUK.
Chief Technology Officer Junaid Peer is an experienced blockchain engineer who has been involved in the development of early encryption projects since his youth.
How to participate
Bulk is now live on the Alphanet testnet, and users can try it out by visiting the official link: alphanet.bulk.trade. The testnet already supports perpetual swaps for major asset pairs, including BTC/USD, ETH/USD, and SOL/USD (all offering up to 20x leverage). Participants simply deposit their SPL assets into a standard Solana wallet to begin simulated trading, without the need for a cross-chain bridge or additional accounts.
Bulk also provides developer-focused documentation and APIs (including CCXT and FIX interfaces) to enable traders and institutions to quickly connect to the testing environment. The team also recommends following their official social channels (such as Twitter and Telegram) for the latest updates and guidance.
