Renegade dark pool cryptography fails to ensure true privacy and fairness
Cryptographic Security Is Not Enough: Privacy Gaps in the Renegade Decentralized Dark Pool
Cryptography and Security
Summary
Dark pools are designed to keep traders' orders private before and after trades, but Renegade, a decentralized dark pool using advanced cryptography, doesn't fully protect users. The authors found ways that traders can learn others’ orders early, interrupt trades unfairly, and even block honest users from trading. They also discovered that most traffic goes through a few central nodes, which undermines the system’s claim of decentralization. This shows that just using strong cryptography isn’t enough to guarantee privacy and fairness in dark pools.
What this means in practice
- •For blockchain developers: Design more robust decentralized trading platforms that address fairness, liveness, and privacy weaknesses beyond cryptographic correctness.
- •For network security engineers: Improve peer-to-peer network architectures to reduce centralization risks in decentralized finance systems similar to Renegade.
Authors
Prerna Arote, Adrian Saiz, Oriol Saguillo, Lucianna Kiffer
Abstract
Dark pools are designed to provide pre-trade privacy, liveness, and post-trade confidentiality - concealing order flow before execution and limiting information leakage after. Decentralized dark pools, such as Renegade, aim to replicate these properties without custodial risk, using secure multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs for private order matching and verifiable settlement. We show that Renegade's cryptographic guarantees do not deliver these dark pool properties in practice. MPC-with-abort ensures correctness but not fairness: a party may learn the match result and abort without penalty, breaking pre-trade privacy. We demonstrate that the protocol's discovery layer further leaks trading intent before MPC even begins, and that sustained probing via selective abort can probabilistically reconstruct counterparty order history, threatening post-trade confidentiality. We also show that the absence of input-consistency checks prior to MPC execution enables a griefing attack using invalid state commitments requiring no real token holdings that continuously locks honest users' wallets and wastes compute, breaking liveness under sustained conditions. We further analyze over 700,000 Renegade transactions on Base and probe the P2P layer, finding that the network is effectively centralized: 88% of traffic routes through a handful of relayers, with only four nodes sustaining the P2P layer. Since relayers hold their users' wallet state in plaintext, this concentration means the system operates as a centralized orderbook in practice - reproducing off-chain the information asymmetry that dark pools are designed to eliminate. Together, our results show that cryptographic privacy does not imply dark pool security: pre-trade privacy, liveness, and post-trade confidentiality each require additional protocol-level guarantees beyond MPC correctness.