Lightspeed Building the Next-Gen Perps Engine on Solana | Tristan Frizza
Feb 12, 2026
Tristan Frizza, co-founder of Bullet and ex-Zeta Markets engineer, builds a next-gen Solana perpetuals exchange. He discusses rebuilding after Solana congestion, a rollup-style network-extension design, Celestia for data availability, ZK proving for verifiable execution, sub-millisecond Rust-native matching, maker protections versus taker bots, launch strategy and token migration.
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Why Network Extensions Unlock Speed
- Network extensions let you offload execution while keeping data availability on a secure L1, enabling faster, specialized execution.
- Tristan argues this trade-off preserves verifiability using ZK proofs while removing L1 consensus bottlenecks for trading speed.
Solving Toxic Taker Dynamics
- The toxic taker problem arises when makers can't reliably cancel stale quotes and bots extract value by sniping.
- Faster execution and application-specific sequencing (e.g., cancel prioritization) make market making viable on-chain.
Performance By Design
- Bullet bakes the matching engine, order book, and margin into its execution layer to reach sub-millisecond performance.
- Tristan claims Bullet can execute orders in roughly 500 microseconds, enabling much denser transaction throughput.