After our space with @bulletxyz_ and @rise_chain on Friday, here is a TL;DR on the discussions we had around the “Infra Race behind Onchain Trading”: Project Status & Timelines - Bullet: Has closed its testnet and is now preparing for its mainnet launch in the coming weeks with whitelists currently being distributed ( - Rise: Its testnet has been live for six months, achieving metrics of 50,000 Transactions Per Second (TPS) with 3ms latency, also preparing for mainnet deployment. Bullet's Approach: A Solana Network Extension Bullet is building as a network extension on Solana to leverage its existing user base and capital. While Solana's base layer is too slow (~400ms block times) for High-Frequency Trading (HFT), Bullet's model provides 1 millisecond execution latency by controlling its own technical stack. - Execution: A purely Rust based environment using the @sovereign_labs SDK for ~1ms soft confirmations. - Data Availability (DA): @celestia, with Mammoth Mini promising up to 27mb/s in data throughput at minimal cost. - ZK Proving: Done through @SuccinctLabs’ RISC-V based SP1 zkVM and prover network. - Settlement: Final execution proofs are verified on the Solana L1, allowing integration with existing SPL token liquidity. Rise's Approach: A High-Performance EVM Rise is building a high-performance, universally programmable EVM as an Ethereum L2. Their thesis is that generalized VMs cannot support professional-grade orderbooks without significant optimizations. - Performance: Achieves 100,000 TPS and 3ms latency through continuous block building. - Strategy: Focuses on general-purpose programmability to enable a composable ecosystem with projects like @nitro_dex or @boom_protocol are already building on it. - Centralization: Currently uses a centralized sequencer to guarantee performance, with plans for future decentralization via co-located sequencers (similar to the approach @HyperliquidX pioneered for its L1 validators). Shared Vision: The Orderbook Frontier Both projects agree on key industry trends: - DeFi Maturation: Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs) are crucial for bringing the capital efficiency and price discovery needed by professional/institutional traders and for the growth of tokenized assets (RWAs). - Larger Market: Decentralized exchanges can serve a global market, avoiding the regulatory and jurisdictional restrictions faced by centralized exchanges like Binance. - Infrastructure Maturity: Modular components (like Celestia for DA, Succinct’s proving infra or the Sovereign SDK) have made it significantly easier and faster to build specialized trading chains. Upcoming Catalysts - Rise: ready to drop major (ecosystem) announcements within the next three weeks. - Bullet: Mainnet is scheduled to launch within the next few weeks Listen to the whole space recording below ↓