The biggest traders have a problem: how to keep their activity discreet enough so as not to influence market prices or reveal long-term strategies.
In traditional markets like stocks, they have had this capability for decades through so-called dark pools and off-exchange platforms. As of January 2025, more than half of all U.S. stock trading took place off public exchanges, according to Bloomberg data.
Crypto has never had an equivalent, and its absence is increasingly difficult to ignore. Every transaction on Hyperliquide, every order on a decentralized exchange, is visible to anyone who pays attention, and companies like DeFiLlama and Arkham exist to collect and present this data in an understandable way.
The crypto market, which prides itself on disrupting traditional finance, has replicated one of TradFi’s most enduring structural problems: If you’re big enough to move the markets, everyone can see you coming. As a result, companies providing liquidity on decentralized public exchanges say their strategies are quickly reverse-engineered.
“On Hyperliquide, one of the top market makers told us he had to rotate his trading strategies every three weeks because they were being copied,” Denis Dariotis, co-founder of GoQuant, a GSR-backed crypto trading infrastructure company, said in an interview. “It’s the alpha’s problem.”
There are other consequences as well. Market makers – the companies that provide the liquidity that keep crypto markets functioning – operate in full view of the public, and the industry has made a habit of making them the bad guys every time something goes wrong. The recent scrutiny of Jane Street’s involvement in the collapse of Terra/Luna is just the latest example. A large company’s on-chain activity is traced, a narrative is formed, and the company spends weeks managing a PR crisis over transactions that, on a traditional site, would have been completely mundane.
GoQuant’s answer is GoDark, a decentralized exchange (DEX) set to launch on Solana in May. This platform uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide transaction details not only from other market participants, but also from the node operators who manage the order book. The ambition is radical: a matching engine where no one in the system can see what it corresponds to.
The immediate question is whether this is technically feasible at a useful pace. Zero-knowledge proofs are computationally expensive, and the architecture adds latency that privacy-agnostic systems do not have to absorb. Internal tests evaluate order matching between 25 and 50 milliseconds. Dariotis considers this to be as fast as most decentralized exchanges, where execution often occurs in hundreds of milliseconds, and he is right. But it’s also an order of magnitude slower than what’s available to co-located businesses with a centralized exchange. For retail traders, this gap probably doesn’t matter. For the market makers GoDark relies on to provide liquidity, this could be the case.
Which raises the most difficult problem. A private exchange without volume is just a dark room. GoDark’s plan for generating liquidity mirrors what Hyperliquid did with its HLP vault: users deposit funds, funds are deployed as market-making liquidity, participants receive reduced fees and first access to liquidations.
It worked for Hyperliquide. But it didn’t work for most DEXs that have tried to replicate the model since, and have generally seen their volumes collapse once the incentive period ended.
Then there’s the regulatory question, which the team has so far avoided having to answer directly. Traditional dark pools are private in the strict sense, in the sense that they hide information about pre-trade orders, but they operate within post-trade reporting requirements and regulatory oversight.
GoDark’s privacy is more absolute by design, it is structurally incapable of producing a complete audit trail. The inclusion of automated OFAC monitoring is a move toward compliance, but it is unlikely to satisfy regulators who have spent the last three years pushing crypto toward more transparency, not less. It remains to be seen how this tension will resolve – and whether it will limit institutional participation to jurisdictions with lighter oversight.
GoDark is separate from GoQuant’s existing institutional product of the same name, a spot DEX built with Copper and GSR that goes into production next month and targets a different, narrower customer base. The May launch is the retail version.
