After high‑stakes trader James Wynn lost nine figures on Hyperliquid after adversaries allegedly “hunted” his positions, Binance’s CZ mused that “Now might be a good opportunity for someone to launch an on-chain dark pool style DEX + perps.”
We couldn’t agree more.
That’s why we’re thrilled to be leading Silhouette’s $3 million pre‑seed round, alongside Hivemind, Amber Group, NGC, No Limit Holding, and Protagonist.
Silhouette is the first shield exchange on Hyperliquid—a privacy-preserving shielded layer that batches and matches orders off-chain inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and settles on-chain.
The fresh capital will accelerate the development of Silhouette’s trading front-end and matching engine, with an alpha release targeted for Q2 2025.
Why Privacy Matters
TradFi cracked the large‑order dilemma decades ago: institutional desks route 30–50 % of equity flow through dark pools so they can accumulate or offload size without telegraphing intent. DEXs flip that script. Every order, every position, every wallet is visible the moment a transaction hits the mempool.
The fallout is real:
- Front‑running & sandwich attacks siphon millions in MEV each month, widening spreads and eroding returns.
- Quote‑fading - market makers pull liquidity as soon as they spot size—forces traders to chase their fills.
- Liquidation hunts make over‑levered positions easy prey.
Put simply, sophisticated traders are swimming naked and getting crushed as a result.
Silhouette provides the privacy they need.
How Silhouette Works
- Shielded order flow – Orders enter Silhouette’s off‑chain matching engine running inside decentralized TEEs. Data stays encrypted; only the matching logic sees plain‑text size and price.
- Batching & crossing – The engine batches orders, nets exposure, and matches trades without leaking intent. If an order—or a slice of it—can’t be crossed privately, the remainder routes straight to Hyperliquid’s public book.
- Onchain‑settlement – The TEE uses Hyperliquid’s chain as the source of truth for trade settlement.
The design sidesteps the cold‑start liquidity problem that doomed earlier privacy DEXs such as Renegade or Penumbra. Silhouette rides on Hyperliquid’s deep liquidity, offering privacy as a feature rather than a trade‑off.
Market Opportunity
On‑chain trading is scaling aggressively. Just two years ago, decentralized exchanges cleared barely ten percent of total crypto volume; today, they process roughly fifteen percent, and the curve is bending upward. We believe that figure can climb to thirty or even forty percent within the next three years as traders migrate for self‑custody, better composability, and 24/7 global access.
DEX to CEX Futures Trade Volume (%) | Source: The Block
In traditional equities, dark pools capture between thirty and fifty percent of institutional flow precisely because they shield large orders from predatory eyes. It is reasonable to expect a similar split to emerge in crypto once privacy tools reach production quality.
Hyperliquid is already the top on-chain venue by derivatives open interest, and its spot market is catching up fast; embedding a dark‑pool layer directly on that liquidity base gives Silhouette a running start.
Regulation is pushing in the same direction. Best‑execution mandates for digital assets are tightening, especially in Europe and Asia, and it is increasingly unacceptable for sophisticated desks to broadcast sensitive strategies in the clear. A shield exchange that combines verifiable settlement with information privacy solves that compliance headache while improving execution quality.
Put together, these trends point to a sizable addressable market: if thirty percent of future DEX flow routes through privacy pools and Silhouette secures even a quarter of the Hyperliquid slice, it would already be handling billions in weekly notional.
Silhouette Team
Silhouette is led by two founders who have spent their careers straddling trading infrastructure and advanced cryptography.
CEO Chandler De Kock cut his teeth scaling Luno’s exchange business across emerging markets before moving on to business‑development roles at UMA and Across. Living at the intersection of product, liquidity, and user acquisition, he understands exactly what pain points professional traders face and how to translate novel tech into a slick trading front‑end.
On the technical side, Stenton Mayne, Co-Founder, Cryptographic Engineer, and Technical Design Lead, brings a rare blend of hardcore engineering and mathematical rigor. After several years as a backend engineer at Amazon Web Services, he dove into crypto as a smart‑contract security expert, rising to the top ranks at Sherlock and Code4rena. His prior collaboration with Chandler—a zero‑knowledge proof‑of‑reserves prototype for Coinbase—demonstrated the pair’s ability to ship cryptography-heavy projects.
Backing them is a small but highly connected advisory circle that includes the HyperActive whale syndicate and several prop‑trading firms who have already committed to stress‑testing the MVP. That early user alignment is crucial. The very traders who suffer most from information leakage are sitting in Silhouette’s feedback loop from day one.
Why We’re Investing
RockawayX is excited to back primitives that make markets fairer, deeper, and more capital‑efficient, and Silhouette checks all three boxes.
It squarely addresses the information‑leakage tax that bleeds value from every large on‑chain trade, turning privacy into an opt‑in feature rather than a trade‑off against liquidity. And by launching inside Hyperliquid’s high‑velocity marketplace, it avoids the cold‑start trap that hamstrung previous dark‑pool attempts.
A bonus: our trades stand to benefit directly as well. As active liquidity providers and traders, we expect to route meaningful size through the shield exchange to sharpen our execution. Its alignment of usage and upside is exactly what we’ve been looking for.
What’s Next
The team is sprinting toward a closed‑alpha launch targeted for later this year.
The first cohort will include a handful of prop desks and on‑chain funds whose feedback will shape iteration on latency, batch frequency, and UI. Parallel work streams are already underway on a native “dark‑mode” plug‑in for the Hyperliquid front‑end, plus an API and SDK so quant strategies can ingest shielded routing with minimal friction.
Looking further out, the roadmap calls for extending the same architecture to other low‑latency L2s - effectively turning Silhouette into a cross‑chain privacy mesh for size traders.
Privacy is about to graduate from nice‑to‑have to baseline infrastructure, and we’re excited to help Silhouette light the path forward.
