Jack Paul 
The transparency problem in crypto markets
Market makers face a real challenge in crypto that doesn’t exist in traditional finance. Every trade they make on public blockchains is visible to anyone watching. This transparency means their strategies get copied quickly, sometimes within weeks.
I think this creates a strange situation where the very openness that makes crypto appealing becomes a liability for large traders. On traditional stock exchanges, more than half of U.S. equities trading happens off public exchanges through dark pools. Crypto has never had that option until now.
The copying problem and public scrutiny
Denis Dariotis from GoQuant shared something interesting. He said one top market maker on Hyperliquid has to change their trading strategies every three weeks because they get copied so fast. That’s just not sustainable for professional trading firms.
But there’s another side to this transparency. When something goes wrong in crypto markets, people often blame market makers. Their onchain activity gets traced, narratives form, and suddenly they’re managing PR crises over trades that would be completely normal in traditional markets. The recent scrutiny around Jane Street’s involvement with Terra/Luna shows how this plays out.
A new approach with GoDark
GoQuant’s solution is GoDark, a decentralized exchange launching on Solana in May. What makes it different is its use of zero-knowledge proofs to hide trade details. Not just from other traders, but even from the node operators running the order book. The idea is pretty radical – a matching engine where nobody can see what they’re matching.
There are technical questions, of course. Zero-knowledge proofs add computational overhead and latency. Internal testing shows order matching at 25 to 50 milliseconds. That’s fast for decentralized exchanges, but much slower than what firms get when they’re co-located with centralized exchanges. For retail traders, that gap might not matter much. For the market makers GoDark needs to attract, it could be significant.
The bigger challenges ahead
A private exchange with no trading volume is just an empty room. GoDark plans to seed liquidity similar to what Hyperliquid did with its HLP vault – users deposit funds that get deployed as market-making liquidity, and participants take a cut of fees. This worked for Hyperliquid, but many other DEXes that tried this model saw volume collapse once incentives ended.
Then there’s regulation. Traditional dark pools conceal pre-trade information but still operate under post-trade reporting requirements. GoDark’s privacy is more absolute by design – it can’t produce a full audit trail. The team has included automated OFAC screening as a compliance gesture, but regulators have been pushing for more transparency in crypto, not less.
How this tension resolves will be interesting to watch. It might limit institutional participation to jurisdictions with lighter oversight. The May launch is the retail-facing version, separate from GoQuant’s existing institutional product with the same name.
Perhaps the most telling part is what this says about crypto’s evolution. The industry that prided itself on disrupting traditional finance is now recreating some of TradFi’s structures, just in a different form. Market makers need privacy to operate effectively, and the market is responding to that need. Whether GoDark succeeds will depend on balancing privacy with performance and regulatory acceptance.