The biggest traders have a problem: how to keep their activity quiet enough not to affect market prices or reveal any long-term strategies.
In traditional markets like stocks, they have had that ability for decades through so-called dark pools and off-exchange venues. Even as far back as January 2025, more than half of all trading in U.S. stocks took place outside public exchanges, according to Bloomberg data.
Crypto has never had an equivalent, and its absence is increasingly difficult to ignore. Every trade on Hyperliquid, every order on a decentralized exchange, is visible to anyone paying attention, and companies like DeFiLlama and Arkham exist to collect and present this data in a digestible 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 markets, everyone can see you coming. As a result, companies that provide liquidity on public decentralized exchanges say their strategies are quickly reversed.
“At Hyperliquid, one of the leading market makers told us that they have to rotate their trading strategies every three weeks because they are being copied,” Denis Dariotis, co-founder of GoQuant, a crypto trading infrastructure company backed by GSR, said in an interview. “That’s the alpha problem.”
There are other consequences as well. Market makers – the firms that provide the liquidity that keeps the crypto markets going – operate in full public view, and the industry has developed a habit of making them the villains when things go wrong. The recent investigation into Jane Street’s involvement in the Terra/Luna collapse is just the latest example. A major company’s onchain activity is tracked, a narrative is formed, and the company spends weeks managing a PR crisis over trades that would have gone completely unnoticed in a traditional venue.
GoQuant’s answer is GoDark, a decentralized exchange (DEX) set to launch on Solana in May. This platform uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide trading information not only from other market participants, but also from node operators running the order book. The ambition is radical: a matching engine where no one in the system can see what they are matching.
The immediate question is whether it is technically possible at any usable speed. Zero-knowledge proofs are computationally expensive, and the architecture adds latency that privacy-agnostic systems do not need to absorb. Internal testing puts order matching at 25 to 50 milliseconds — Dariotis hits this as fast compared to most decentralized exchanges, where execution often runs into hundreds of milliseconds, and he’s right. But it’s also an order of magnitude slower than what’s available to companies co-located with a centralized exchange. For retailers, this difference probably doesn’t matter. For the market makers that GoDark is banking on to provide liquidity, it might.
Which brings up the more difficult problem. A private exchange without volume is just a dark room. GoDark’s plan to seed liquidity mirrors what Hyperliquid did with its HLP box – users deposit funds, the funds are deployed as market-making liquidity, participants charge a fee and get first access to liquidations.
It worked for Hyperliquid. But that hasn’t worked for most of the DEXs that have tried to replicate the model since, which have generally seen volume collapse when the incentive period ends.
Then there’s the regulatory question, which the team has so far avoided having to answer directly. Traditional dark pools are private in the narrow sense of hiding pre-trade information, but they operate under 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 screening is a gesture toward compliance, but it is unlikely to satisfy regulators who have spent the last three years pushing crypto toward more transparency, not less. How that tension resolves—and whether it limits institutional participation to jurisdictions with lighter oversight—remains to be seen.
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 launch in May is the retail version.
