Bulk Trade Review 2026: Solana Perps, AURA Points Farm
Anatoly Yakovenko and Wintermute funded a perp DEX that lives inside a Solana validator. Still testnet, still no token — which is exactly why the pre-deposit window matters.
Every perp DEX I’ve reviewed here was already open for business. Hyperliquid runs the deepest book in DeFi. Vest and Hibachi are live and taking real orders. Bulk isn’t. It’s on testnet, mainnet is a fourth-quarter target with no firm date, and there is no token.
So why write about it now? Because Anatoly Yakovenko — the co-founder of Solana — put money into it, because the design is genuinely unusual rather than another fork of somebody’s order book, and because the window where positioning is cheap is the window before launch. That window closes when mainnet opens. Here’s what I found after a week inside the testnet and a real pre-deposit of my own.
Disclosure: this article contains referral links. If you sign up for Bulk through them, DeFiSecret earns AURA points on your pre-deposit at no additional cost to you. This does not affect our assessment; the risks below are reported as we found them.
Risk warning: Bulk is a pre-launch product. Pre-deposits are real USDC sent to a protocol that has not yet run in production, and there is no confirmed token, airdrop, conversion rate or launch date. Perpetual futures are leveraged products where losses can exceed your deposit. Derivatives are restricted or prohibited for retail investors in many jurisdictions — check your local rules. Treat any capital committed here as at risk.
⚡ Pre-deposits are live and AURA accrues weekly. Sign up with code Defisecret — note the code is case-sensitive.
What Bulk is, in plain words
A perpetual futures exchange on Solana, built by North Star Labs, that is trying to close the gap between how a DEX settles and how a centralised exchange feels to trade. Its own pitch is blunt about it: “power of DEX, performance of CEX.”
That screenshot needs a caveat before anything else: everything on the trading side is testnet right now. The balance in my account came from a faucet, not my wallet, and the volume and open-interest figures on the terminal are simulated. I’m showing it because the product is worth seeing, not because those numbers mean anything.
What is real is the pre-deposit campaign, which runs on Solana mainnet with actual USDC. Those are two separate things and it’s worth keeping them separate in your head.
Who’s behind it
Bulk closed an $8 million seed round co-led by 6th Man Ventures and Robot Ventures, with participation from Big Brain Holdings, Wintermute, and Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder.
Two of those names carry weight beyond the cheque. Wintermute is one of the largest market makers in crypto and doesn’t back venues whose matching engine it thinks is broken — the same signal Jane Street’s investment sent at Vest, and Big Brain Holdings is on that cap table too. Yakovenko’s involvement matters differently: Bulk’s whole architecture depends on running inside Solana’s validator stack, and having Solana’s co-founder invested suggests that approach isn’t considered hostile by the people who maintain the chain.
The architecture, and why it isn’t just another perp DEX
Most perp DEXs are contracts deployed onto a chain. Bulk is a modified validator. The team forked Jito-Agave into Bulk-Agave and added a dedicated plugin — “Bulk Tile” — that runs order matching, risk and liquidation logic as a specialised execution layer alongside standard Solana validators, sharing identity keys and inheriting stake weight from the parent validator.
The division of labour: Solana keeps custody, deposits and withdrawals; Bulk handles matching, ordering and real-time risk. Orders pass through its own BULKBFT consensus, then a 25-millisecond taker speed bump and deterministic fair ordering before matching — a design aimed squarely at front-running and MEV. Matching runs in structured ticks roughly every 20ms.
The practical claim is CEX-grade latency without giving up self-custody or handing an operator the power to reorder your fills. Whether it holds up under real load is exactly what mainnet will answer, and nobody can tell you today.
What’s listed, and what it costs
| Market | Max leverage |
|---|---|
| BTC-USD | 40x |
| ETH-USD | 25x |
| SOL-USD, XRP-USD | 20x |
| ZEC, SUI, BNB, JTO, LIT, FARTCOIN | 10x |
Leverage is conservative by perp DEX standards. Hyperliquid and Vest will both hand you far more rope; Bulk caps BTC at 40x and most of the long tail at 10x. Given that liquidations on a new venue are the thing most likely to go wrong, I read that as discipline rather than a limitation.
On fees, the published schedule has two phases:
| Phase | Maker | Taker |
|---|---|---|
| Genesis — first 30 days | 0 bps, falling to −2.5 bps rebate at top tier | 3.5 bps → 2.2 bps by volume tier |
| Public tiers — after | 2.0 bps, falling to −2.0 bps rebate | Broadly unchanged |
Zero maker fees for the first month is an aggressive opening, and the fact that my account’s displayed rate matches the documented Tier 1 to the basis point is a small but reassuring sign that the docs describe the actual product.
AURA accrues every week you stay deposited, and the pre-mainnet window is the cheapest one there will be.
How to farm AURA before mainnet
One caveat up front: Bulk’s own documentation still lists the AURA page as “coming soon.” What follows comes from the live app and from the team’s public statements, not from a published spec — so treat the mechanics as accurate-as-observed rather than contractual.
Step 1 — deposit USDC. Send Solana USDC to the pre-deposit portal. The minimum is 10 USDC. Your AURA scales with size multiplied by time held, so an early small deposit can outrun a late large one.
Step 2 — let it sit. AURA reveals weekly rather than ticking up live. I put in 1,025 USDC and currently sit at 255 AURA, rank #2,819 — against a leaderboard where the top wallet has deposited 1.3M USDC for roughly 305,000 AURA. That ratio tells you plainly that this is a whale-weighted programme.
Step 3 — refer. Each referral who deposits at least $100 earns you AURA. Codes are case-sensitive — ours is Defisecret with a capital D, and getting the case wrong silently drops the attribution.
Step 4 — stake, if you want the second lever.
Staking SOL through Bulk’s validator earns yield and counts toward AURA alongside the pre-deposit pool. It also has a neat logic to it: the validator is the same infrastructure the exchange runs inside, so staking to it strengthens the thing you’re farming.
Step 5 — practise on testnet. The trading terminal is open and funded by faucet. My testnet account has turned over roughly $79,000 in volume for a $27 profit, which is a fair advertisement for how hard it is to make money scalping perps — but it’s free, and it means you’ll know the interface before real money is involved.
What worries me
There is no token, and no confirmed airdrop. The team has publicly said 30% of supply is earmarked for users, which would be generous — but no allocation formula, conversion rate or snapshot date has been published. AURA is a number in a database until Bulk says otherwise.
Your deposit is real money in a pre-production system. The trading is testnet; the pre-deposit isn’t. You are sending live USDC to a protocol that has never run under real load, to earn points with no contractual value. That is a genuinely different risk from farming on a venue that already works.
The rewards are whale-weighted. A 1.3M deposit earns roughly 1,200x the AURA of my 1,025. If you’re depositing a few hundred dollars, be honest with yourself about what proportion of a 30% allocation that realistically claims.
Mainnet has no firm date. Q4 is a target. Pre-launch timelines slip constantly, and every week of slippage is a week your USDC sits idle instead of earning yield somewhere it could.
The architecture is unproven where it counts. Running an exchange inside the validator is a real innovation, and real innovations fail in production in ways testnets never reveal. Wintermute and Yakovenko backing it is a strong prior, not a guarantee.
Verdict
Bulk is the most interesting pre-launch perp DEX I’ve looked at this year, and the reason is architectural rather than promotional: putting the matching engine inside the validator is a genuine attempt at the CEX-speed-with-DEX-custody problem, not a reskin. The cap table backs that read — Wintermute doesn’t fund venues it thinks can’t match, and Solana’s co-founder doesn’t fund forks of his own validator lightly.
But price the risk honestly. This is a bet on a team shipping something that doesn’t exist in production yet, paid for with real USDC, in exchange for points that carry no promise. If you already farm pre-token venues, Bulk deserves a slot alongside Vest and Hibachi — and unlike those two, the pre-mainnet window here is genuinely early. If you want a venue to trade size on today, that’s Hyperliquid, and it isn’t close.
A defined slice of your stack, deposited early and left alone, code Defisecret for the referral credit — same discipline as always.
📈 Get positioned before mainnet
Send at least 10 USDC on Solana to the pre-deposit portal and AURA starts accruing on the next weekly reveal. Deposit early — points scale with size and time held.
Referral link: early.bulk.trade/deposit?ref=Defisecret
For a venue even earlier than Bulk — no mainnet, no product, just a waitlist — see our GTE.xyz review: Paradigm-backed, built on MegaETH, and free to position in.
FAQ
Is Bulk safe to use?
Bulk is pre-launch, which is its own risk category. Trading currently runs on testnet with faucet funds, so nothing is at stake there. Pre-deposits are real USDC on Solana sent to a protocol that has not yet operated in production, and there is no confirmed token or airdrop backing the AURA points you earn. The $8M seed from Wintermute, 6th Man Ventures, Robot Ventures and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko is a meaningful signal, but it is not a guarantee. Only commit capital you can afford to have locked or lost.
What is Bulk?
A perpetual futures DEX on Solana built by North Star Labs. Rather than deploying contracts onto the chain, it runs a modified validator — Bulk-Agave, a fork of Jito-Agave — with a plugin that handles order matching, risk and liquidations natively, while Solana retains custody and settlement.
How do Bulk AURA points work?
AURA is Bulk’s pre-mainnet points programme. You earn it by pre-depositing USDC on Solana, with your share scaling by deposit size multiplied by how long it stays deposited, and it reveals weekly rather than accruing live. Referrals who deposit at least $100 earn you additional AURA, and staking SOL through Bulk’s validator also contributes. Bulk’s own docs still list the AURA page as “coming soon,” so the mechanics are observed rather than formally specified.
Does Bulk have a token or confirmed airdrop?
No token exists and no airdrop is confirmed. The team has publicly stated that 30% of eventual supply is earmarked for users, but no allocation formula, conversion rate or snapshot date has been published.
When does Bulk mainnet launch?
The team has targeted the fourth quarter, with no firm date announced. Testnet is live now, and the mainnet pre-deposit campaign runs until launch.
This article is research commentary, not financial advice. Perpetual futures are high-risk leveraged products and losses can exceed your deposit; pre-launch deposits carry additional risk of loss, lock-up and delay. Funding details sourced from public reporting; fee and architecture details from Bulk’s documentation; pre-deposit and account figures captured from the live app in August 2026. Screenshots are from our own testnet account and mainnet pre-deposit. Details may change.