Scale or Die at Accelerate 2025: Building The On-Chain NASDAQ

Bullet is set to transform the landscape of decentralized finance with its groundbreaking on-chain NASDAQ-like platform, offering millisecond-level trading and unparalleled liquidity on Solana.

Summary

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Tristan Frizza, co-founder of Bullet, presented the company's vision for building an on-chain NASDAQ at the Accelerate 2025 conference. Bullet aims to revolutionize financial markets by creating a decentralized, transparent, and highly efficient trading platform on Solana. The project leverages ZK roll-up technology to achieve millisecond-level execution times for perpetual futures trading, significantly outperforming existing solutions.

Bullet's platform addresses key limitations of both traditional and centralized crypto exchanges, offering 24/7 markets, global accessibility, and full self-custody of funds. The system is designed to provide deep liquidity, support hundreds of assets, and offer a comprehensive suite of trading products including perpetuals, spot, and lending.

Recent developments in blockchain technology, including high-performance chains like Solana and advancements in roll-up solutions, have made Bullet's vision possible. The platform is built on a custom Rust-based environment, allowing for extreme optimization and performance. Bullet also introduces innovative features to improve liquidity provision and user onboarding, positioning itself as a potential game-changer in the rapidly evolving DeFi landscape.

Key Points:

On-Chain NASDAQ Vision

Bullet's core mission is to bring financial markets on-chain in a transparent and decentralized manner. This vision addresses the limitations of traditional markets, which are only open for limited hours and have restricted accessibility. It also aims to overcome the shortcomings of centralized crypto exchanges, which, while offering 24/7 trading, still rely on centralized systems and custodial solutions.

The on-chain NASDAQ envisioned by Bullet would operate 24/7, offer unstoppable markets for any asset, and be globally accessible from day one. It would be fully self-custodial, ensuring users maintain control of their funds. Transparency and verifiability are key features, with all transactions secured by zero-knowledge proofs. The platform is designed to allow for composability, enabling other applications to build on top of it, fostering a rich ecosystem of financial products.

Technological Breakthroughs

Bullet's platform is made possible by recent advancements in blockchain technology. High-performance blockchains like Solana have paved the way for Rust-based alternatives to traditional Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) systems. This allows Bullet to build its core systems in pure Rust, achieving exceptional execution performance.

The roll-up and data availability stack has also matured significantly, enabling Bullet to leverage these technologies for its platform. The company uses the Sovereign SDK framework for modular roll-ups, which is nearing mainnet launch. This combination of high-performance blockchain and advanced roll-up technology allows Bullet to achieve millisecond-level transaction execution times, a critical factor for price discovery in financial markets.

Liquidity and Market Making Innovations

Recognizing the importance of liquidity for any exchange, Bullet has implemented several innovations to attract and retain market makers. The platform introduces a novel approach to order execution that prioritizes cancellations over potentially toxic orders, allowing for tighter quotes and better liquidity.

Bullet has also standardized much of the tooling used by market makers, adopting REST and WebSocket interfaces instead of the more common JSON-RPC approach in the blockchain space. This makes it easier for traditional market makers to integrate with the platform. Additionally, Bullet has developed liquidity and strategy vaults to provide baseline liquidity and allow users to deploy automated trading strategies on-chain.

User-Friendly Onboarding

To cater to both crypto natives and new users, Bullet has reimagined the onboarding process. Traditional exchanges often require users to go through multiple steps, including installing browser extensions, managing private keys, and dealing with gas fees. Bullet simplifies this process with features like social login, direct on-ramps, session keys, and gas fee abstraction through a Paymaster program.

The platform also supports multi-collateral trading, allowing users to use various major assets as margin, including BTC, ETH, and SOL. This flexibility, combined with yield-bearing deposits and fast bridging solutions, creates a seamless and attractive environment for traders of all levels.

Facts + Figures

• Bullet achieves transaction execution times of approximately 3 milliseconds, significantly faster than competitors like Hyperliquid (70ms) and Solana's block times (400ms).
• The platform supports hundreds of assets for trading.
• Bullet offers a full product suite including perpetuals, spot trading, and lending.
• The system is built on a pure Rust environment for optimal performance.
• Bullet uses the Sovereign SDK framework for modular roll-ups.
• Traditional financial markets like NASDAQ are only open about 35 hours per week, equivalent to roughly 80% downtime.
• Decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes have reached hundreds of billions of dollars per month.
• App revenue in the DeFi space is in the hundreds of millions.
• Demand for block space on Solana, measured by tips and base fees, is also in the hundreds of millions.
• Bullet supports multi-collateral trading, accepting BTC, ETH, SOL, and other major assets as margin.

Top quotes

1. "How do we bring financial markets on-chain in a transparent and decentralized way?"
2. "We want something that's 24/7. We want it to have unstoppable markets on any asset."
3. "I believe fundamentally, we're in the very early days of DEX perps."
4. "We do this in a different way to get rid of this like first come, first serve nature, where we can prioritize cancels ahead of toxic takers."
5. "We pivot that on its head. We have social login, direct on-ramps. You don't have to go via centralized exchanges, session keys, and we abstract gas through our Paymaster program."

Questions Answered

What is Bullet and what problem is it trying to solve?

Bullet is a decentralized finance platform aiming to create an on-chain version of NASDAQ. It's addressing the limitations of both traditional financial markets and centralized crypto exchanges by building a transparent, decentralized, and highly efficient trading platform on Solana. Bullet offers 24/7 markets, global accessibility, and full self-custody of funds, while achieving millisecond-level execution times for trades.

How does Bullet achieve such fast transaction speeds?

Bullet achieves its high-speed performance through a combination of technologies. It uses a custom Rust-based environment for its core systems, which allows for extreme optimization. Additionally, Bullet leverages ZK roll-up technology on top of Solana, offloading much of the computation from the main chain. This combination enables Bullet to process trades in as little as 3 milliseconds, significantly faster than existing solutions.

What types of assets and trading products does Bullet support?

Bullet supports a wide range of assets and trading products. The platform can list hundreds of different assets for trading, providing a diverse marketplace. In terms of products, Bullet offers a full suite including perpetual futures, spot trading, and lending services. All these products are integrated into a single, cross-margin platform, allowing for efficient capital use and risk management.

How does Bullet improve liquidity compared to other exchanges?

Bullet has implemented several innovations to enhance liquidity. One key feature is their order execution system that prioritizes cancellations over potentially toxic orders, allowing market makers to provide tighter quotes. They've also standardized tooling for market makers, making it easier for traditional players to integrate. Additionally, Bullet has developed liquidity and strategy vaults that provide baseline liquidity and allow users to deploy automated trading strategies on-chain.

How does Bullet make it easier for new users to get started with trading?

Bullet has reimagined the onboarding process to make it more user-friendly, especially for those new to crypto. The platform offers features like social login, direct fiat on-ramps, and session keys to simplify account creation and management. Bullet also abstracts away gas fees through a Paymaster program, removing a common barrier for new users. Furthermore, the platform supports multi-collateral trading, allowing users to use various major assets as margin, providing flexibility and ease of use.