Sugar Rush Launches Cardano CLOB Testnet Powered by Gummiworm

Sugar Rush is launching its public testnet on August 24 as Sundae Labs moves its new order book-based trading infrastructure into broader testing on Cardano.

Powered by Gummiworm, the exchange is designed to support faster order execution and trading strategies that are difficult to run efficiently through conventional automated market makers.

The launch includes a trading competition beginning at 13:00 UTC on August 24 and running until September 6 at 20:00 UTC. Participants will trade fictional assets while generating activity across the exchange and its underlying infrastructure.

Sugar Rush Brings CLOB Trading to Cardano

Sugar Rush is a decentralized exchange built around a central limit order book, or CLOB, rather than the automated market maker model used by most Cardano DEXs.

AMMs organize liquidity through pools and pricing formulas. A CLOB maintains buy and sell orders at different prices, allowing participants to place orders directly into an order book and execute them when matching conditions are met.

The model is widely used by centralized exchanges and traditional financial markets because it gives traders more control over execution prices and supports active market making and automated strategies that depend on rapidly placing, modifying or cancelling orders.

Sugar Rush brings that structure into Cardano infrastructure.

Users can place, update and cancel orders, while the system also supports withdrawals and bulk operations. Sundae Labs has released documentation and developer tooling that allows automated systems to interact with the exchange, extending the testnet beyond manual trading.

The current competition uses fictional tokens rather than live market assets. More than $5,000 in prizes has been allocated to the skill-based event, while the resulting activity will also serve as a stress test for the exchange.

Sugar Rush is being developed by the team behind SundaeSwap, but it is not intended as a replacement for the existing SundaeSwap AMM. The two systems use different market structures, with Sugar Rush focused on order book execution and the requirements of active traders and market makers.

Gummiworm Handles High-Speed Execution Above Cardano

Sugar Rush runs on Gummiworm, which Sundae Labs describes as a custody settlement protocol designed for fast finality, high throughput and programmable decentralized custody.

Instead of submitting every order change directly to Cardano Layer 1, Gummiworm processes trading activity inside a faster execution environment while maintaining a connection with funds secured through smart contracts on the base chain.

The architecture uses a Gummiworm “head” to process Layer 2 state and a group of participants called a “coil” to replicate and verify changes.

Sundae Labs operates the head during the current testnet, while Blink Labs and Lantr participate in the coil. The architecture is designed to accommodate additional participants as development continues.

Gummiworm also includes an evacuation mechanism that maps user balances and assets associated with open orders back to designated Cardano Layer 1 destinations, providing a defined path for funds to return to the base chain.

Sugar Rush adds another execution layer through Intel TDX trusted execution environments.

Orders are encrypted before sequencing, reducing the information available to infrastructure operators before transaction ordering is established. The design is intended to limit opportunities to exploit pending order information through selective transaction ordering or similar forms of maximal extractable value.

Once ordering is determined, the Sugar Rush ledger processes the trading activity and distributes the resulting state through the Gummiworm infrastructure.

Public Test Will Measure Gummiworm Under Trading Load

Sundae Labs has already published performance results from earlier Gummiworm development, but the figures measure different layers of the system.

Informal testing of the current single-peer Gummiworm head reached peak throughput of around 4,000 transactions per second, with sustained performance near 3,400 TPS.

Separately, isolated benchmarks of the Sugar Rush CLOB ledger exceeded 70,000 transactions per second. That figure measures the order book engine alone and is not an end-to-end performance result for the public testnet.

The development team has identified networking and the current JSON-based transport layer as major constraints between those results. Planned optimizations include binary transport protocols, transaction batching and pipelined execution.

Earlier controlled testing also recorded soft Layer 2 confirmations at roughly 370 microseconds above network latency with a single head peer. Those results were produced in controlled conditions rather than under the multi-user workload beginning with the public launch.

The August testnet now exposes Sugar Rush to traders and automated systems competing within the same order book. Orders, cancellations and other activity will pass through the CLOB ledger, Gummiworm head and coil infrastructure while the system remains connected to Cardano Layer 1 settlement.

When the competition ends on September 6, Sundae Labs will have two weeks of public operating data from the combined Sugar Rush and Gummiworm stack, moving the project from isolated technical benchmarks to a broader test of how its order book infrastructure performs under sustained user and bot activity.