Venture Capital: This DEX Solves Problems That Fell FTX

On Monday, 20th February 2023, Haseeb Qureshi posted on Twitter that Renegade, a new DEX application, is the solution to problems that fell FTX.

FTX reminded us of the failures of centralization. Yes, we need regulation, but even moreso we need innovation.

Proud to announce we seeded @renegade_fi, an on-chain dark pool that uses ZKPs and MPC to build a truly anonymized decentralized exchange.

The future is trustless. 👇 pic.twitter.com/uK7AWODaKr

— Haseeb ＞|＜ (@hosseeb) February 20, 2023

Haseeb, managing partner at Dragonfly, announced the release of Renegade, an on-chain dark pool that uses ZKPs and MPC to build a truly anonymized decentralised exchange which he believes is the innovation the crypto space needs after the failures of FTX, which led to a string of government regulations. 

In addition, he tweeted that due to the FTX meltdown and insufficiency, traders have been wary of counterparty risk from exchanges leading CeFi to enter a new low-trust phase. He assures that counterparty risk is obviated with Renegade via cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs. Custody is guaranteed on-chain, and there is no need to trust anybody. 

Also, much of MEV can be eliminated from DeFi, as validators and sequencers only have the ability to see ZKPs of valid transactions. Transaction reordering or sandwich attack shenanigans would be a non existent concept. 

Further in the thread, Haden made it a point to note that so far, most applications of ZKPs involving rollups have been for scalability. But in Renegade, ZKPs are engineered to hide trades and balances, after which the matching engine is run using MPC without revealing its internal state before the clearance of trades. 

Haseeb retweeted an official tweet from Renegade indicating that Renegade exists as a solution to DeFi lagging far behind trusted centralised exchanges and opaque OTC desks. High fees, and zero privacy had always been a shortcoming of DeFi. Anyone can copy-trade, miners can atomically front-run transactions, and toxicity analysis are significantly easier.

Renegade solves this by building the next generation of exchanges, a L2-native dark-pool protocol, which goes even further than TradFi dark pools. Renegade allows for full transaction privacy, both pre and post-trade. With a dark-pool, trades are end-to-end encrypted and guaranteed to trade at NBBO midpoint prices. Takers can avoid all market maker spreads by transacting directly at the midpoint price.

In order to do this without the presence of a trusted party, recent advances in multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs are being employed. MPC is the core that allows for full CLOB functionality while maintaining privacy from third parties.

New users are being onboarded over the coming months to a whitelisted testnet. To gain access, Renegade requests that an interest form be filled to begin trading activities.