Privacy Guarantees

In the Introduction, we mentioned three classes of problems that arise in current decentralized exchanges: Lack of pre-trade privacy, lack of post-trade privacy, and MEV. By using pairwise MPC matching and zero-knowledge settlement as discussed in The MPC-ZKP Architecture, Renegade solves all three of these problems:

• Pre-trade privacy. Since wallets are maintained locally by relayers, the smart contract never sees any order or balance information. Also, handshakes are propagated with commitments to the orders (rather than the plaintext orders themselves), so no information is learned about an order in advance of it matching.
• Post-trade privacy. The on-chain state only consists of a Merkle tree of commitments to wallets, so balances, orders, and trades are never posted in-the-clear, even after a valid match. Even the counterparty only learns what tokens were swapped; they cannot learn, for example, the full size behind a match.
• Minimal MEV. Since the smart contract only checks zero-knowledge proofs, the block producer or sequencer has no ability whatsoever to sandwich or front-run trades.

Put differently, Renegade claims the following privacy properties:

• Third-parties to a trade (including the sequencer/proposer) learn nothing about the state of the exchange, aside from global token in-flows and out-flows and the total number of open orders.
• Counterparties to your trade learn what tokens were swapped if there was a match, but nothing else. If there was no match, then counterparties only learn this fact.
• Relayer(s) who manage a wallet learn the contents of the wallet (balances, outstanding orders, etc.), but have no ability to mutate the wallet.