Glossary

This page collects plain-English definitions of terms used across BULK Exchange, organized A–Z. For formal specifications, see the linked pages on docs.bulk.trade.

A

Access Code: BULK's mainnet is currently invite-only. New accounts need an access code to sign up — see Getting Started for how to get one.

AURA Points: BULK's activity/loyalty points system, widely understood to feed into a future token allocation. As of this writing, BULK's own documentation lists the detailed points mechanics as "coming soon" — no formula, conversion rate, or snapshot date has been publicly confirmed by BULK itself. Treat any specific numbers you see elsewhere (weekly point totals, conversion ratios) with real skepticism until BULK publishes primary documentation.

B

BULKBFT: The leaderless Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol that BULK's validator network uses to agree on order matching and execution, running alongside (not instead of) Solana's own consensus. See Leaderless Consensus for why "leaderless" specifically matters, and Validator Rewards on BULK for how the validators running this consensus actually get paid.

Builder Code: A fee-sharing mechanism for anyone routing order flow to BULK on behalf of other users — a bot, trading terminal, or front-end. The builder attaches a small fee (1–15 basis points, user-approved) to orders they route, on top of BULK's own fee, without any order internalization. See High-Frequency Market Making on BULK for the full mechanics.

C

CLOB (Central Limit Order Book): The order-matching model BULK uses: standing buy and sell orders sit on a shared book, matched by price-time priority. This is a fundamentally different model from pool/oracle-based perpetual exchanges (like Jupiter Perpetuals), which don't have an order book at all — see BULK vs Jupiter Perpetuals for what that distinction actually means in practice.

D

Deterministic Execution: A property of BULK's matching engine: every validator processes the same batch of transactions and arrives at byte-identical fills and state, without needing to communicate mid-execution. This is what makes instant state-divergence detection possible across the validator set.

F

Fair Ordering: BULK's set of mechanisms to prevent trade reordering, front-running, and censorship — including requiring a transaction to be seen by a quorum of validators before it's eligible for matching, and a deterministic shuffle (rather than validator discretion) to decide execution order within a batch. See Fisher-Yates Shuffle for the specific algorithm used.

Fisher-Yates Shuffle: The specific randomization algorithm BULK uses to determine transaction order within a consensus batch, seeded by a consensus-derived timestamp rather than anything a validator could predict or influence in advance. This is the concrete mechanism behind Fair Ordering — it's why order-of-arrival within a batch can't be gamed.

Follower Mode: A mode validators (or sophisticated market makers running their own node) can run in to get direct local reads of network state and higher throughput, without actually participating in consensus. See High-Frequency Market Making on BULK — this is infrastructure for serious volume, not something a typical trader needs.

Funding Rate: An hourly payment between long and short position holders on a perpetual contract, designed to keep the contract's price tethered to the underlying spot price. If funding is positive, longs pay shorts; if negative, shorts pay longs. The payment flows directly between traders — BULK doesn't take a cut of funding payments. See Funding Rate Explained for the calculation and a worked example.

G

Genesis Liquidity Phase: BULK's launch-period fee promotion — maker fees fully waived for the first 30 days of mainnet, with reduced taker fees on top. See Fees on BULK for the phase-by-phase breakdown of what happens once it ends.

GTC / IOC / ALO

Time-in-force settings that control how long an order can rest before it's cancelled.

GTC (Good-Til-Cancelled) — the default. Rests on the book until filled or manually cancelled.
IOC (Immediate-Or-Cancel) — fills whatever is immediately available, cancels the rest.
ALO (Add-Liquidity-Only / post-only) — rejected outright (as `rejectedCrossing`) if it would immediately cross the book, guaranteeing it always fills as a maker order. Note: BULK's WebSocket feed reports this order type as `"postOnly"` on the wire, even though the internal name is ALO.

I

Isolated Margin: The alternative to portfolio margin: collateral for a single position is walled off in its own sub-account (created automatically when you set the isolate flag on an order), so a liquidation there can't touch your other positions — but you also lose the correlation benefit that portfolio margin gives you.

L

L0 (Layer 0): How BULK describes its own architecture: a specialized execution layer running natively alongside Solana, rather than as a smart contract deployed on top of it. BULK handles matching, consensus, and risk in its own layer; Solana still handles custody and settlement.

Leaderless Consensus: A consensus design where no single validator gets to propose or control what enters a batch — a meaningful anti-censorship property, since censoring a transaction would require compromising a large fraction of the validator set rather than just whoever's currently "in charge." BULKBFT uses this design.

Liquidation: The forced reduction or closure of a position when your account equity falls below the maintenance margin requirement. BULK tries partial, incremental reductions first (sized to how severe the shortfall is) before resorting to closing the position entirely. See How Liquidations Work.

Long: A position that profits when the price of the underlying asset rises. The opposite of a short.

M

Maker / Taker: A maker order adds liquidity to the order book (it rests instead of filling immediately). A taker order removes liquidity by matching against a resting order. BULK currently waives maker fees during its Genesis Liquidity phase and charges takers a small fee that scales down at higher volume tiers. See Fees on BULK.

Maintenance Margin: The minimum equity you must hold against an open position before it's at risk of liquidation. On BULK this isn't a single fixed percentage — it moves with your leverage, how much moving the market to close your position would cost (liquidity impact), and current market volatility regime.

Mark Price: The reference price used to calculate unrealized P&L and trigger liquidations. On BULK it's a blend of the oracle price (adjusted for BULK's own book premium), the order book's median price, and a smoothed local price — not simply the last traded price, which makes it harder to manipulate with a single large trade.

Minisketch: A set-reconciliation protocol BULK's validators use to propagate order-book changes to each other efficiently — bandwidth usage stays flat regardless of how frequently the book updates, rather than scaling with update volume.

N

Noise Protocol: The encrypted-channel protocol BULK uses for client-to-validator communication — the same cryptographic primitive family used by WireGuard, among other systems.

P

Perp DEX: Shorthand for a decentralized exchange trading perpetual futures, where funds stay in your own custody and trades settle on-chain rather than on a company's internal servers. BULK, Jupiter Perpetuals, and Hyperliquid are all perp DEXes, despite using very different underlying architectures — see BULK vs Jupiter Perpetuals and BULK vs Hyperliquid.

Perpetual Futures (Perps): A leveraged derivative contract that tracks an underlying asset's price with no expiration date. A funding rate mechanism keeps the contract's price anchored to spot instead of an expiry date doing that job. See Contract Specifications on BULK for BULK's specific contract parameters.

Portfolio Margin: BULK's margin model evaluates your entire portfolio as one unit, accounting for correlation between your positions, instead of adding up margin requirements position-by-position. A hedged portfolio (e.g. long BTC perp and short ETH perp, given how correlated those two assets tend to be) can require significantly less margin than the same positions held in isolation — BULK's documentation cites a 30–70% margin reduction for a correlated hedge like that at 10x leverage. See Understanding Portfolio Margin for a walked-through example.

Q

Quality Score: The scoring formula behind the BULK Alpha Program's revenue share — weighted toward open interest (40%), spread/depth (30%), and uptime (20%), with raw volume weighted lowest (10%) specifically because it's the easiest component to game.

R

Reduce-Only: An order flag that clamps the order's size so it can only shrink your existing position, never flip it or open a new one in the opposite direction.

Risk Vault: BULK's protocol-level backstop, used when Auto-Deleveraging alone can't fully cover a shortfall. Rather than leaving a loss uncollateralized on the exchange, a defined share of it is absorbed by this vault — see Auto-Deleveraging (ADL) for exactly when and how.

S

Self-Trade Prevention: BULK's matching engine checks whether an incoming order and a resting order belong to the same account. If they match, the engine skips that resting order (without cancelling it) and keeps looking for other liquidity, rather than letting you accidentally trade against yourself. See the full breakdown for exact behavior and how sub-accounts are treated.

Short: A position that profits when the price of the underlying asset falls. The opposite of a long.

Slippage: The gap between the price you expected when placing an order and the price you actually got — usually caused by thin liquidity, high volatility, or a large order size relative to available depth. A limit order caps your slippage by refusing to fill outside your specified price; a market order doesn't.

Sub-Account: A separate trading account under your main wallet (up to 64 per wallet), each with its own independent portfolio margin, positions, and orders. Liquidation in one sub-account has no effect on your master account or your other sub-accounts. If you need multiple people to approve actions on an account rather than just separating strategies, see Multisig on BULK instead.

T

Taker Speed Bump: A temporary (documented as lasting the first 90–120 days after launch) 25-millisecond minimum delay applied to any transaction that could take liquidity, giving resting maker orders a brief window of protection. Post-only (ALO) orders are exempt and execute immediately.

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See also