Bulk Amasses $25.9M in Pre-Deposit TVL Ahead of Mainnet Launch

After a strong showing in its paper trading testnet, Bulk Trade, an emerging Solana-based perps venue, is rapidly climbing Solana’s TVL rankings ahead of its highly-anticipated mainnet launch.

Within 10 days of opening, Bulk’s pre-deposit campaign has amassed over $25.9M in capital. At launch, traders' pre-deposited funds are instantly converted into margin, and will be directly tradable on the exchange.

Alongside mounting anticipation for the launch of a new venue, perps activity on Solana is steadily trending upwards, with volume, open interest, and trade count hovering around new YTD highs.

Solana’s Perps Traders Are AuraMaxxing

On June 1st, Bulk opened the floodgates to its pre-deposit campaign, allowing future traders to prepare their capital ahead of the exchange's mainnet launch and earn AURA, a points system believed to reward activity and alignment.

10 days later, Bulk has amassed over $25.9M in TVL, rising through Solana DeFi TVL rankings and challenging the liquidity of rival venues like Pacifica and GMTrade. Despite strong growth, the three aforementioned still fall short of Jupiter and its $JLP token, which has had several years to become integrated ubiquitously across Solana’s DeFi economy.

While rising deposit flow into Bulk suggests high demand from traders eager to explore a new venue, the exchange’s growing TVL is no doubt reinforced by deposits from airdrop farmers. Bulk co-founder Kobie McGlashan has previously indicated the protocol intends to reward users with 30% of Bulk’s token supply at TGE, one of the largest community allocations in Solana history.

Naturally, Bulk’s rising capital and attention flows have drawn criticism from certain network participants. Detractors have argued that DeFi users have apparently learned nothing from recent hacks, decrying traders who have deposited funds into a venue with no mainnet product.

McGlashan has refuted these claims, transparently outlining the security stack built around Bulk’s pre-deposit campaign. The cofounder re-asserted that, alongside rewarding users, the pre-deposit campaign ensures deep liquidity across the venue on Day 1. This measure effectively solves the cold-start problem that has plagued many emerging Solana perps venues, who have struggled to attract the levels of liquidity a competitive trading venue requires.

Volume, Open Interest, and Trade Count Trends Upwards

After a slow start to the year, Solana’s perps sector is steadily gaining momentum. Spurred by a somewhat controversial push from ecosystem leaders, and an open invitation from the Solana Foundation encouraging perps builders to deploy on the network, trading activity on Solana is rising.

According to Blockworks data, weekly perps trading volumes are hovering around YTD highs of $23B. Additionally, rising volumes have coincided with an uptrend in open interest, the preferred metric of Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

But despite progress, Solana’s perps sector still has a long way to go before being competitive with industry leaders.

Compared with industry leaders, Solana perps venues typically have much higher turnover ratios, measured by dividing notional volume by the value of open positions. 

Where lower turnover ratios suggest organic activity by traders expressing their thesis on a given market, a high turnover ratio typically implies traders are unwilling to hold positions long-term, and is commonly associated with inorganic activity.

With liquidity and traders already queueing at the gates, all eyes now turn to Bulk’s upcoming mainnet launch, expected in the coming months.

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