Start trading at trade.renegade.fi — all you need is a crypto wallet.

Trade on Renegade

Renegade is a fully-private decentralized exchange with zero MEV, copy trading, slippage, spread, or price impact.

Dark pools account for nearly half of equities trading volume in traditional finance, and Renegade unlocks dark pool trading for DeFi for the first time.

Why Dark Pools for DeFi?

DeFi is the future, but current decentralized exchanges are fundamentally flawed. Traders have lost billions to MEV, wallet tracking, statistical arbitrage, and quote fading, largely because today’s on-chain exchanges are fully transparent.

In TradFi, similar privacy concerns led the biggest financial institutions to come together to build dark pools — private, peer-to-peer trading venues where order information is held private from adversaries.

Building a dark pool in traditional finance is easy enough — just trust a big bank like Goldman Sachs to not leak order information. However, how can we do this in DeFi, where we cannot rely on a centralized intermediary?

The answer lies at the frontier of cryptography — Renegade uses both multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs to enable privacy during the entire lifecycle of a trade.

By leveraging MPC and ZK, Renegade brings private trading to DeFi, without compromising on any principles of decentralization.

What’s Great About Renegade?

In addition to guaranteed global privacy, Renegade guarantees optimal pricing on all of your trades with zero slippage, spread, or price impact.

Renegade is unlike other decentralized exchanges — it’s neither an AMM nor a CLOB. Instead, Renegade is a crossing network, a peer-to-peer liquidity network that allows natural buyers and sellers to anonymously find each other.

And since Renegade matches traders peer-to-peer, crossing networks can give traders optimal execution. Specifically, whenever you trade in Renegade, the price you get is equal to the midpoint of the bid-ask spread on Binance.

Since Binance is the most liquid venue for price discovery, Renegade delivers true global best execution — no more stale AMM prices, no more thin order book liquidity, and no more crossing wide spreads.

Trade on Renegade

As of today, Renegade is live on Arbitrum One.

Trade on Renegade

The best part? It’s completely open to anyone. TradFi dark pools are only available to the biggest financial institutions, whereas DeFi enables institutional-quality pricing for all traders, no matter the size.

Get started trading: trade.renegade.fi
Join the Discord: discord.renegade.fi
Learn more about Renegade: renegade.fi
And dive into the tech details: docs.renegade.fi

What’s Next?

Over the coming months, we’ll be adding many more assets as the network stabilizes — Renegade enables trading on any ERC-20 pair!

We’re also directly onboarding liquid token funds and market makers with a dedicated cluster. Get in contact at chris@renegade.fi, or check out the node codebase directly.

Happy trading!

What is Renegade, again?

Renegade is building an “on-chain dark pool”, a new type of decentralized exchange.

Dark pools are new to crypto, but they’re very popular in traditional equities trading. A dark pool (also called a “crossing network”) enables large, institutional traders to buy or sell large quantities of a stock without informing the wider market of the position that they’re accumulating.

Why keep trading private? In short, to get a better price — if the wider market was alerted of a large whale accumulating a position, the price would immediately jump in response, giving the whale a worse price on the rest of their trade.

Much like dark pools in equities, Renegade brings private trading to DeFi. As a “zkDEX”, Renegade enables completely confidential trading, all while being fully decentralized.

Why use Renegade?

In short, Renegade has two nice properties that make it a fantastic option to trade ERC-20s in size:

1. Optimal pricing — whenever you make a trade on Renegade, you’re guaranteed to get the midpoint of the Binance bid-ask spread. Since Binance is the most liquid exchange, it tends to lead in price discovery. So, by trading at the Binance midpoint, you’re getting the best price available, globally.

2. Optimal privacy — even though Renegade is fully decentralized, it keeps your order information completely confidential. No third-parties (including the Arbitrum sequencer or any Ethereum L1 block producer) can learn any details whatsoever about users’ orders, either before they fill or after the match has occurred.

Because of these pricing and privacy properties, Renegade solves a lot of problems in current DEX design:

• Zero MEV — since trades in Renegade settle in zero-knowledge, there is no incentive for block producers to reorder or front-run Renegade transactions.

• Guaranteed best execution — whenever a trade happens in Renegade, it will clear at the real-time midpoint of the Binance bid-ask spread. This is the best price available globally.

• Pre-trade confidentiality — matching an order is done via a multi-party computation, so your order information is never leaked to any third-party whatsoever.

• Post-trade confidentiality — settlement of trades is done in zero-knowledge, preventing third-parties from tracking your wallet holdings or copying your positions.

Renegade is true institutional-quality liquidity, made permissionless.

What’s the state of the testnet?

The current Renegade testnet is quite faithful to what mainnet latencies will look like. The system is running full zkSNARK proving and verification under the hood, with settlement onto Arbitrum Stylus.

Currently, Renegade has MPC matches disabled — all matches in the current testnet are “internal matches”, meaning they’re still in zero-knowledge, but not computed via a collaborative SNARK.

Nonetheless, most operations in Renegade (depositing tokens, placing an order, etc.) are accurate and faithful to mainnet latencies, and all operations will cost less than $1 in gas fees at mainnet.

MPC-based matching for self-run relayers will be launched in the coming weeks, as we make the network fully permissionless for mainnet.

Trade on Renegade

What’s Next?

Over the coming months, we’ll be continuing to get the testnet ready for mainnet use with live funds. Currently, we expect to launch Renegade to mainnet in early August 2024, once Arbitrum Stylus goes live to mainnet.

Crypto trading volume has surged over the past few years and we have begun seeing real activity inside of crypto-native DeFi protocols. However, nearly 95% of trading still happens off-chain, inside of centralized exchanges and within opaque OTC desks.

Why? In addition to historically high fees, decentralized exchanges are extremely adversarial environments, leading to worse trades for sophisticated market participants:

• Atomic MEV. Trades with high slippage tolerance are prone to being atomically sandwiched, where the validator both front-runs and back-runs the trade in order to make risk-free profit.

• Copy-Trading. Many different tools allow for anyone to easily scape the portfolio of any wallet addresses, making it extremely difficult to keep profitable positions private.

• Counterparty Discrimination. When all past trade history is public, anyone can analyze this data to find the most sophisticated and profitable traders. This allows for discrimination in filling trades or quoting prices against these counterparties (e.g. an RFQ market maker will give bad quotes to a profitable HFT trader).

• Cross-Exchange Arbitrage. When markets are very fragmented, it becomes extremely difficult to fill large size across dozens of venues: Any misstep in execution and the trader is exposed to cross-exchange arbitrage.

• Statistical Arbitrage. Tools like TWAP order types are often employed to help massage orders into the market, but such trading patterns often leave traces that are detectable by arbitrage bots.

At Renegade, we are solving all of these problems by building an end-to-end encrypted exchange, a dark pool. We leverage recent advances in multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs to provide the strongest guarantees of anonymity.

Just like ZCash is the anonymous network for the transfer of value, Renegade is the anonymous network for the exchange of value.

Check out our documentation to see how we leverage MPC to build a DEX with full CLOB functionality, while fully obfuscating all balances, orders, and filled trades: docs.renegade.fi

And for the most complete technical specification of the protocol, see our full whitepaper: whitepaper.renegade.fi

We’re onboarding users to our whitelisted testnet in the coming months, register here for access: renegadefi.typeform.com/access

In addition to Dragonfly and Naval as co-leads, we are backed by an amazing group of angel investors: Balaji Srinivasan (Coinbase), Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet), Marc Bhargava (Tagomi), Lily Liu (Osmosis, Solana), and Lev Livnev (Symbolic Capital Partners).

We’re excited to share more as we work towards a public testnet in the coming months. Subscribe to this newsletter for updates, and follow us on Twitter for the latest.