Design Goals

In the process of building DEXs for the last few years, we encountered a number of challenges with general purpose blockchains. Bullet was built with the explicit design goal of enabling the best possible trading experience on-chain, bar none.

Challenges

Congestion - during periods of high market volatility, Solana often became congested as bots flooded the network to capture arbitrage and liquidation opportunities. This created a negative feedback loop—congestion made it harder for regular users to close their trades, which in turn led to more liquidations and even more congestion. As an exchange operator, this was a major challenge, as transaction inclusion was never guaranteed, making it risky to manage platform exposure.
Unpredictable fee markets - while improvements are on the way, Solana's fee market has historically been unpredictable. Liquidity providers struggle to determine how much to bid for priority fees each time they update their quotes. This results in an unfavorable environment where market makers must constantly overpay just to avoid getting sniped. On top of that, traders are forced to pay gas fees on every limit order—whether it gets filled or not—leading to high operational costs.
Slow block times - price discovery currently tends to happen on CEXs like Binance for the most liquid markets at latency of around 20ms. Even the fastest blockchains only produce blocks every 400ms, over an order of magnitude slower. Hence DeFi is relegated to CEX-DEX arbitrage, rather than being the venue for price discovery.
Non-standard tooling - javascript and web3.js, JSON-RPC and the many other choices of tooling make trading on DeFi platforms a nightmare to integrate and maintain, especially for the larger names in trading.
High UX hurdles - needing to download browser extensions, manage seed phrases, sign every transaction and miss critical trades, and remember to top up the gas in your wallet are all unintuitive to a non web3-native audience.
Increasing blockspace costs - as Solana has prevailed, the costs to running a fully on-chain orderbook have skyrocketed. Blockspace is becoming valuable (a net good thing) but crowding out high throughput applications.

Solutions

Top-notch reliability - owning our own blockspace as a network extension means that Bullet will aim for high uptime and be purring along even when the markets go haywire. Bullet aims to deliver several thousand TPS that is uncontested with other NFT, gaming or memecoin apps.
Breakneck speed - by offloading transaction processing to our specialized execution layer, we can provide users soft finality on their transactions in under 2 milliseconds, enabling real-time DeFi experiences.
Sustainable market microstructure - by introducing MEV-aware application-specific sequencing rules, we can prioritise maker orderflow and prevent liquidity providers from getting picked off constantly for providing tight spreads. This levels the playing field for smaller market makers who don't need to compete on shaving milliseconds off their execution latency, and encourages deeper liquidity across markets.
Unparalleled user experience - seamless onboarding via fast, trust-minimized bridging from the L1, as well as direct fiat onramps will make getting started on Bullet a breeze. Furthermore, utilising embedded wallets and a paymaster will mean that users don't have to download crypto wallet extensions, manage seed phrases or even worry about paying gas to start their trading journey.
Industry standard connectivity - we support REST/WS interfaces that align with CEX APIs, and aim to provide client implementations in Rust and Python. In future we hope to support financial protocols like FIX.
Security and verifiability at its core - nodes in the Bullet network can execute any transaction in a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), with all proofs and data being made available on the public Solana ledger for anyone to verify trustlessly. Don't trust, verify.

The Silver Bullet

Bullet is the realization of a truly endgame blockchain architecture—one that takes the most valuable insights from Solana’s speed and Ethereum’s decentralization research, specifically Vitalik’s vision of centralized block production with decentralized verification (as per his aptly named Endgame blog).

This is not just another L1 fork with a small validator set running in a single data center; Bullet is a fundamentally new paradigm. Written from the ground up in Rust, it combines modular sequencing, zero-knowledge transaction verification, and trust-minimized Solana settlement to deliver a high-performance trading environment that is fully verifiable and censorship-resistant. Every transaction is provable on-chain without compromising execution speed, ensuring that high-frequency trading can thrive without the centralization risks of existing models.

Bullet does not force traders to choose between speed and security—it achieves both, proving that DeFi can be as performant as traditional finance while remaining decentralized at its core. This is the blueprint for the future of on-chain trading: a system where efficiency, fairness, and verifiability are built into the very fabric of the protocol.

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Last updated 18 days ago

Challenges

Congestion - during periods of high market volatility, Solana often became congested as bots flooded the network to capture arbitrage and liquidation opportunities. This created a negative feedback loop—congestion made it harder for regular users to close their trades, which in turn led to more liquidations and even more congestion. As an exchange operator, this was a major challenge, as transaction inclusion was never guaranteed, making it risky to manage platform exposure.

Unpredictable fee markets - while improvements are on the way, Solana's fee market has historically been unpredictable. Liquidity providers struggle to determine how much to bid for priority fees each time they update their quotes. This results in an unfavorable environment where market makers must constantly overpay just to avoid getting sniped. On top of that, traders are forced to pay gas fees on every limit order—whether it gets filled or not—leading to high operational costs.

Slow block times - price discovery currently tends to happen on CEXs like Binance for the most liquid markets at latency of around 20ms. Even the fastest blockchains only produce blocks every 400ms, over an order of magnitude slower. Hence DeFi is relegated to CEX-DEX arbitrage, rather than being the venue for price discovery.

Non-standard tooling - javascript and web3.js, JSON-RPC and the many other choices of tooling make trading on DeFi platforms a nightmare to integrate and maintain, especially for the larger names in trading.

High UX hurdles - needing to download browser extensions, manage seed phrases, sign every transaction and miss critical trades, and remember to top up the gas in your wallet are all unintuitive to a non web3-native audience.

Increasing blockspace costs - as Solana has prevailed, the costs to running a fully on-chain orderbook have skyrocketed. Blockspace is becoming valuable (a net good thing) but crowding out high throughput applications.

Solutions

Top-notch reliability - owning our own blockspace as a network extension means that Bullet will aim for high uptime and be purring along even when the markets go haywire. Bullet aims to deliver several thousand TPS that is uncontested with other NFT, gaming or memecoin apps.

Breakneck speed - by offloading transaction processing to our specialized execution layer, we can provide users soft finality on their transactions in under 2 milliseconds, enabling real-time DeFi experiences.

Sustainable market microstructure - by introducing MEV-aware application-specific sequencing rules, we can prioritise maker orderflow and prevent liquidity providers from getting picked off constantly for providing tight spreads. This levels the playing field for smaller market makers who don't need to compete on shaving milliseconds off their execution latency, and encourages deeper liquidity across markets.

Unparalleled user experience - seamless onboarding via fast, trust-minimized bridging from the L1, as well as direct fiat onramps will make getting started on Bullet a breeze. Furthermore, utilising embedded wallets and a paymaster will mean that users don't have to download crypto wallet extensions, manage seed phrases or even worry about paying gas to start their trading journey.

Industry standard connectivity - we support REST/WS interfaces that align with CEX APIs, and aim to provide client implementations in Rust and Python. In future we hope to support financial protocols like FIX.

Security and verifiability at its core - nodes in the Bullet network can execute any transaction in a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), with all proofs and data being made available on the public Solana ledger for anyone to verify trustlessly. Don't trust, verify.

The Silver Bullet