6 posts tagged with "article"

Over the last few months, we’ve been working with a series of traders and users refining the shielded experience. Today, we go live in an open beta.

What Is Available​

Spot HYPE/USDC using our shielded feature.

The feature is accessible via our Silhouette App and API.

Via the App, you can trade:

• Naked: Works exactly as it does on Hyperliquid or any Builder Code frontend.
• Shielded: Using the Silhouette environment and a delegated wallet to execute trades on the user’s instruction.

How It Works​

Silhouette's trading mechanism starts with users depositing funds into a contract. This wallet processes and executes trades based on instructions from the Silhouette TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), which the user initiates.

User funds remain under user control. They can only be managed via the user's original wallet. The Silhouette system can only process orders originating from the user's wallet and has no direct control over the user's funds without explicit instructions.

Trades are executed directly on the Hyperliquid orderbook using the Silhouette system. Once a trade is completed, user balances are encrypted within a smart contract. This smart contract will be essential for our upcoming Sovereign Withdrawal feature, which ensures access to funds even if the Silhouette system is unavailable.

Silhouette supports policy engines as part of our plan to introduce compliance into our system. While we strongly advocate for open finance principles, we also recognise the need to make crypto markets more accessible to traditional financial participants. This is a nuanced and technical topic which deserves its own deep dive. If you represent a fund or any institutional entity interested in utilising this feature from its launch, please contact us through our public Telegram group to arrange access.

Why This is Beneficial​

The system is the first step toward a fully fledged execution engine that can directly integrate with Hyperliquid order books.

The current version enables a series of use cases:

• User trades are shielded by the wallet's total trading volume, with higher volume making individual activity harder to isolate.
• Silhouette wallets will soon get lower fees. We are working with partners to make Silhouette the cheapest venue to buy HYPE. More on this soon
• The TEE is a conduit for users' intents on Hyperliquid while always maintaining funds are controlled by the users.

With the above in mind, soon HIP-3 deployers, Spot buyers and Spot Equities buyers will be able to discretely accumulate the required HYPE and other spot assets at the best possible price anywhere. This will be complimented with customisable policy engines for all your compliance needs.

What's Next​

This is just the first phase. Here is what to expect next:

• More pairs rolled out to the shielded feature. Community requests are welcome.
• HIP-3 markets support on the naked perps side.
• Shielded TWAP and VWAP order types as part of our iceberg suite.
• Request for Quote (RFQ) and Request for Match (RFM) infrastructure for larger workflows introduced. We’re looking for early users and market makers to test and shape this design. If that’s you, please reach out.
• Net Settlement layer for reduced price impact by furthering our shielded offering.
• While supported on day one of our launch, we will share more details on our policy engines and how they enable more use cases on-chain.
• Future releases will introduce deeper intent protection, more expressive order types, and fully confidential routing that still settles in public.

Trade now: https://app.silhouette.exchange

Want programmatic access? Reach out via our Telegram Community Channel.

Part three in our series on shielded trading

Dark pools promised to fix DeFi’s biggest flaw: open exposure.

For traders hunted by bots and shadowed by copycats, they offered something revolutionary, institutional-grade privacy.

By hiding order flow, they aimed to level the playing field. And on paper, that made sense.

But in practice, they became liquidity graveyards. The traders they were meant to serve stayed away. Makers refused to quote. Spreads widened. Volumes flatlined.

So what went wrong?

Part two of our three-part look at shielded trading.

Last week we argued that radical transparency turns DeFi into open season for front-running and strategy degradation. This follow-on asks a tougher question: what happens when we swing the pendulum the other way and hide everything?

Short answer: hiding everything often hurts more than it helps. Trading into complete darkness is scary.

Part one of a three-part series on the future of shielded trading.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is one of crypto’s boldest promises: an open, borderless financial system that anyone can access with nothing more than a wallet and an internet connection.

And to be fair, it has delivered. DeFi protocols now hold over $114 billion in value. Billions move daily through decentralized exchanges and perpetuals. Financial primitives like lending, swaps, and synthetic assets are now programmable and permissionless.

But for all the technical achievement and excitement, DeFi is still stuck in a loop, haunted by the same issues that have plagued it for years.

This article doesn't focus on solutions. It focuses on the rot at the foundation, the systemic trade-offs that make DeFi vulnerable, exploitable, and often unusable for the very people it's meant to empower. If you're looking for our solutions to some of these problems, read our article on Silhouette's mission and vision for DeFi.

Decentralised Finance has come a long way since the DeFi Summer of 2020. What began as a movement for open, permissionless transactions has now matured into a high-speed, scalable ecosystem. But it is all out in the open – every move is completely visible to anyone watching.

At Silhouette, we believe individual confidentiality enhances the foundational benefits of DeFi: accessibility and openness. The latest developments in cryptography enable us to apply verification to outcomes at a speed that matches the current on-chain pace. A transition from full transparency to verification is crucial to the future of an on-chain financial ecosystem.

The DeFi economy will combine open financial markets with the natural desire for users to reduce the visibility of their positions within the market. Silhouette is based on the premise that open public markets and private user interactions are non-negotiable requirements to usher in an on-chain environment that fits the needs of all of finance.

TL;DR

Silhouette is building on Hyperliquid because the future of on-chain needs speed, scale and privacy.

For an introduction to Silhouette, please see Introducing Silhouette.

Silhouette's goal is straightforward: offering a decentralised and full-featured private trading system that does not compromise user experience. A downfall of many other private trading environments is a lack of liquidity. Hyperliquid provides this liquidity and opportunity to support Silhouette’s mission.