Bulk and the Battle for the Perps Market

1. The Problem: Why On-Chain Trading Still Lags

1.1 Why Are DEXs Still Slow?

• Latency bottlenecks: mempools, global state sync, gas fees
• The cost of composability: shared blockspace vs. appchains

1.2 DEX vs. CEX: What Are the Structural Trade-offs?

• Throughput, latency, custody, trust, UX
• Why institutions prefer CEXs — and what needs to change

1.3 Why Performance Matters for Market Quality

• Role of market makers
• The correlation between speed and liquidity

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2. The Opportunity: CEX Dominance Is Fracturing

2.1 DEX vs. CEX Volume Trends

• Growth in on-chain derivatives, spot volume share
• Evidence of stickier institutional activity on-chain

2.2 Macro Pressure on CEXs

• Regulation, custody blowups, and transparency demands

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3. The Evolving On-Chain Perps Landscape

3.1 Hyperliquid

• Custom stack, performance, market share

3.2 GMX (v1 & v2)

• Pool-based perps, tradeoffs, tokenomics

3.3 Jupiter Perps

• Aggregation model, early traction, integration layer

3.4 BULK

• Architecture: in-memory matching, gasless, BLS consensus
• Economic model: Shapley rewards, validator revenue
• Risks and critical views: open source? validator centralization?

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4. Solana’s Bid for HFT: Can It Win?

4.1 Infra Tailwinds

• Votors, Alpenglow, Firedancer, local fee markets

4.2 The Case for Solana vs. Appchains

• Network effects, atomicity, UX
• The case against: flexibility, fragmentation, ecosystem moat

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5. Investment Outlook

5.1 What Defines the Winning Exchange?

• Liquidity, latency, incentives, trust

5.2 Is BULK a Good Bet?

• Strategic risks, moat defensibility, team
• Path to capturing institutional flow