Larger traders have a problem: how to keep their business quiet enough to not influence market prices or reveal long-term strategies.
In traditional markets, such as stocks, they have had that ability for decades through so-called dark pools and off-exchange venues. Even in January 2025, more than half of all U.S. stock transactions took place outside of public exchanges, according to Bloomberg data.
Cryptocurrencies have never had an equivalent and their 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 that data in a digestible way.
The cryptocurrency market, which prides itself on disrupting traditional finance, has replicated one of TradFi’s most persistent structural problems: if you’re big enough to move markets, everyone can see you coming. As a result, companies that provide liquidity on decentralized public exchanges say their strategies are quickly being reverse engineered.
“At Hyperliquid, one of the top market makers told us that they have to rotate their trading strategies every three weeks because they copy them,” Denis Dariotis, co-founder of GoQuant, a GSR-backed cryptocurrency trading infrastructure company, said in an interview. “That’s the problem alpha.”
There are other consequences too. Market makers (the companies that provide the liquidity that keeps crypto markets running) operate in plain public view, and the industry has developed a habit of turning them into villains whenever 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 tracked, a narrative is formed, and the company spends weeks managing a PR crisis over transactions that, in a traditional setting, would have been completely unremarkable.
GoQuant’s answer is GoDark, a decentralized exchange (DEX) launching on Solana in May. That platform uses zero-knowledge proofs to hide trading details not only from other market participants but also from node operators executing the order book. The ambition is radical: a comparison engine where no one in the system can see what is matching.
The immediate question is whether that is technically possible at a useful speed. Zero-knowledge proofs are computationally expensive and the architecture adds latency that privacy-agnostic systems do not have to absorb. Internal tests put order matching between 25 and 50 milliseconds; Dariotis considers this to be fast relative to most decentralized exchanges, where execution often reaches hundreds of milliseconds, and he is right. But it is also an order of magnitude slower than what is available to companies co-located with a centralized exchange. For retailers, that gap probably doesn’t matter. For the market makers that GoDark relies on to provide liquidity, it could.
Which poses 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 a portion of the fees and have first access to settlements.
It worked for Hyperliquid. But it hasn’t worked for most DEXs that have attempted to replicate the model since then, which have typically seen a collapse in volume once the incentive period ends.
Then there is the regulatory question, which the team has so far avoided having to respond to directly. Traditional dark pools are private in the strict sense that they hide pre-trade order information, but 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 OFAC’s automated assessment is a gesture toward compliance, but it is unlikely to satisfy regulators who have spent the last three years pushing cryptocurrencies toward more transparency, not less. It remains to be seen how that tension is resolved and whether it limits 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, smaller customer base. Releasing in May is the retail version.
