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What is Silhouette?

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Silhouette Exchange is currently under development, these docs are subject to change.

Silhouette is the shield exchange on Hyperliquid that enables the most sophisticated strategies to flow freely on-chain.

We believe markets work best when they are transparent at the public level but private at the personal level. Public transparency ensures integrity, efficiency, and fair price discovery across the system. At the same time, individuals and institutions deserve privacy for their trading activity, strategies, and portfolio choices. By combining these two principles, Silhouette creates a venue where market data remains open and auditable, while personal execution flows remain shielded, protecting participants without compromising on the health and transparency of the market itself.

Transparent markets, private participants. Our mission is to bring liquidity on-chain.

Key features​

  1. Privacy-Preserving Execution

    • Shielded trading flows.
    • Randomized execution (size/time jitter) prevents signaling risk.
    • Net settlement design ensures only final balances hit public ledgers.

  2. Public Market Transparency

    • Aggregate market data, volumes, and settlement remain open and auditable.
    • Preserves price discovery and public trust while keeping personal flows private.

  3. Block-Trading & RFQ Mechanisms

    • Tooling for executing large orders.
    • Reduces market impact and slippage.

  4. Efficient HyperEVM to HyperCore flows

    • Native support for seamless flows between HyperEVM and HyperCore.
    • Enables dApp interactions to settle directly into the core order book.
    • Bridges on-chain programmability (EVM smart contracts) with off-chain performance (HyperCore engine).
    • Unlocks hybrid execution strategies combining private venue flows with public liquidity.

  5. Policy engine support

    • Optional onchain policy engines for programmatic compliance logic.
    • Trade-on chain while meeting your regulatory requirements.

The Problem We're Solving​

For all of finance to truly scale on-chain, there must be a mechanism for privacy. Absolute transparency into every position at all times undermines many legitimate use cases—particularly for institutions, treasuries, and funds that need to execute large trades or protect strategic flows.

Previous attempts at building privacy into DeFi have fallen short. Many sacrificed liquidity and composability, isolating flows from the broader ecosystem. Others failed to offer the auditability and compliance frameworks institutions require, leaving adoption stalled. The result is a tradeoff between fully transparent but hostile markets, or fully opaque but untrusted ones.

Silhouette bridges this divide by combining public market transparency with private participant flows. Our design ensures that markets remain open, auditable, and trustworthy, while giving participants the confidentiality they need to trade at scale. This unlocks new flows from sophisticated actors and institutions, bringing depth and resilience to DeFi markets.

Core Team​

The team behind Silhouette has roots in zero-knowledge cryptography, CEX bootstrapping, and protocol engineering. With experience spanning DeFi teams UMA, Across, Etherfi, AWS and Centralised exchanges like Luno and Coinbase, we’re building a product that bridges traditional capital markets rigor with crypto-native privacy primitives.