5 posts tagged with "article"

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.