The start-up Renegade, which is creating a revolutionary type of decentralized exchange, has emerged thanks to a $3.4 million seed round headed by Dragonfly Capital and the former CEO of AngelList, Naval Ravikant.
In addition to Balaji Srinivasan and Lily Liu, Tarun Chitra from Robot Ventures, Marc Bhargava from Tagomi, and Lev Livnev from Symbolic Capital Partners participated in the round, the startup said.
It’s time to kill CeFi.
— Renegade (@renegade_fi) February 20, 2023
Introducing Renegade, the on-chain dark pool.
We’ve raised $3.4M from @dragonfly_xyz and @naval to build the first MPC-based DEX, a completely anonymous decentralized exchange. pic.twitter.com/o7zyZRHiSn
Renegade is developing an on-chain version of a dark pool, a trading venue common in traditional financial markets, based on multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs.
Institutional investors can buy or sell large numbers of shares on traditional stock exchanges using dark pools with less of a chance that the price would move in response to their big orders. DeFi, in contrast, makes all trading information available to the public.
The simple objective of Renegade is to allow educated traders to trade at better prices without revealing their intentions to the bigger market.
Renegade removes counterparty risk through encryption and zero-knowledge proofs. Custody is guaranteed on-chain. Users don't have to have faith in anyone. Validators and sequencers can considerably lower MEV in DeFi because they only ever inspect the ZKPs of valid transactions. No more transaction reordering shenanigans or sandwich attacks.
The majority of ZKP applications to date have, like rollups, been for succinctness. However in Renegade, ZKPs are used to mask balances and transactions.
The matching engine is then used with MPC without revealing its internal state before transaction clearing.
Renegade's system intends to improve price execution in DeFi by prohibiting practices like front-running, sandwiches, and statistical arbitrage.
The business claims that its goal is to provide a trustless trading platform while avoiding the dangers present in today's decentralized exchanges. It will consequently cross-order flow at middle pricing right away in an anonymous manner.
Renegade is already operational on a private testnet, and in the second quarter of 2023, it will be live on a public testnet.