How GoDark targets $100m in daily trading through its new crypto dark pool

Like many teenage boys, Denis Dariotis didn’t want his teacher to see what was on his computer. So when the teacher asked to sneak a peek, Dariotis said no.

“No, sorry, it’s private. I can’t show you,” Dariotis remembers saying.

This was not the first time he’d faced off with his teachers. Having first dipped his toes into stock trading at age nine with the help of his father, a portfolio manager, Dariotis had found himself not just managing his own assets but those of a sprawling group of investors.

“It caused a lot of problems,” Dariotis told DL News.

For instance, he couldn’t show the screen of his computer where he was doing trades to his teacher.

“That was probably my initial introduction to why privacy mattered,” Dariotis said.

Now, the 22-year-old is planning to help crypto traders keep their trading strategies private.

In May, Dariotis will launch GoDark, a decentralised exchange, or DEX, for onchain perpetuals, a kind of financial contract that allows trading in an asset’s price movement.

The upcoming launch will put the company on a collision course with Hyperliquid, the industry leader.

GoDark’s unique selling point?

To deliver something traders have sought for a long time: dark pools that keep their trading strategies secret.

What is a dark pool?

Despite the slightly sinister-sounding name, dark pools are common within traditional finance. They enable traders to hide their orders.

That means that competitors cannot frontrun or copy them before they are completed. It gives them an advantage in the cut-throat competition over razor-thin margins. It also allows them to place big orders without causing supply shocks in markets.

The practice was officially recognised by the US Securities and Exchange Commission as far back as 1979.

In crypto, where everyone can see your orders in real time, dark pools have so far been mostly an elusive prospect due to the inherent transparency of blockchains.

“You’re basically just playing poker with your cards on the table, face up,” Dariotis said.

The traders GoDark has spoken with say they have to change their strategies every two or three weeks to avoid being copied by competitors, which means they lose their edge, Dariotis said.

Others have pointed out this issue.

Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder of crypto exchange Binance, called for the ability to hide orders on DEXs in June.

“I have always been puzzled with the fact that everyone can see your orders in real-time on a DEX,” Zhao tweeted. “The problem is worse on a perp DEX where there are liquidations.”

Some, like Hyperliquid rival Aster, have already launched dark pools or similar privacy features for their users.

Dariotis says they fail to fully hide the orders.

“They're just taking those orders away from the order book, but you could fully see the transaction settle onchain, to and from the wallet,” he said. “You can see the amounts, and you could actually see in the trades feed the details of that order. It's not inherently fully private.”

Other privacy tools, like the crypto mixer Tornado Cash, are being hounded by regulators because criminals and sanctioned entities use them to launder money. That means traders don’t know whether the funds being swapped are clean, Dariotis argues.

“Just as importantly, those types of interfaces, while they may be private, offer really poor execution because of their swap interface — there's large amounts of slippage,” he said, referring to the price discrepancy that can occur between placing a trade and when it’s executed.

“There's no proper price discovery in the order books.”

$4 million seed round

GoQuant, Dariotis’ institutional digital asset trading firm that was founded back in 2022, developed GoDark in collaboration with Copper and GSR. Both firms backed GoQuant’s $4 million seed round in May 2025.

The new DEX for perps will hide orders by processing them through a series of offchain nodes operated by the GoDark protocol.

Those nodes are responsible for order matching, but the people hosting them won’t be able to see the details of what they’re matching, Dariotis said.

That is done using zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that provides only the necessary information — and nothing more — to verify and perform order-matching actions.

To avoid the protocol being misused, GoDark will geolock certain regions that aren’t on any US sanctions list. It has also integrated with Chainalysis to prevent incoming funds from illicit sources.

Retail first

GoDark’s target customer on day one will be retail customers who already trade on Hyperliquid.

Dariotis also opens the door to the institutional clients that GoQuant caters to — such as hedge funds, family funds, banks and proprietary trading firms — to join the fray further down the line.

He aims to see “about $100 million a day in volume” by the second month of trading.

Hyperliquid and Aster, by comparison, see $6 billion and $2 billion in daily trading volume, according to Defillama.

“There’s a lot of [traders] that care about privacy,” Dariotis said.

Eric Johansson is the managing editor at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at eric@dlnews.com.