Private Perps: The End of Target Practice

Private onchain perps? It starts with Synthetix.

In May 2025, the now-infamous trader James Wynn evaporated nearly $100 million over the span of a calendar week following a series of liquidations on multiple high-leverage Bitcoin longs on Hyperliquid. 

Sure, Wynn was loudly telegraphing his $100M+ leverage positions across social media for clout — but even if he hadn’t been — Wynn’s 9-figure positions, liquidation prices, collateral balances, and leverage levels were already completely available to anyone in the world with an internet connection. 

It’s up for debate whether or not Wynn was in fact “brutally hunted” by market makers or groups of traders that pooled together capital, but this is completely beside the point. 

Regardless of whether Wynn told anyone about these trades, 9-figure onchain leverage positions could have been found quickly and easily by any sophisticated actors looking to hunt his stops and push the market against him. 

Privacy For Onchain Perps

Public onchain positions — especially for perps — unnecessarily expose traders to a swathe of predatory risks that stem from hosting a matching engine onchain: broadcasting individual trades, sizing, PnL, and liquidation points. 

Following Wynn’s liquidation spree on Hyperliquid, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) came out with an X post calling for increased privacy measures for decentralized exchanges. 

“For perps (or futures), it is even more important not to let others know/see your orders. If others can see your liquidation point, they could try to push the market to liquidate you. Even if you got a billion dollars, others can gang up on you.” — CZ.

It’s stunningly obvious how publicly broadcasted perp data paints a giant target on traders’ backs, but for too long, traders have been forced to make a Faustian bargain between the privacy and execution of a CEX and the benefits of permissionlessness, composability, and self-custody of a DEX. 

“Public PnLs and liquidation lines turn traders into bait. That’s not ‘transparency,’ that’s target practice…” 

This changes with Synthetix. 

CEX vs. DEX 

Historically, CEXs have been the preferred platform for trading perps. There are many reasons why this is the case, but ultimately it comes down to two primary factors: 

1. Fast execution & good UX: centralized servers allow for rapid order matching and execution, which is crucial for an HFT system and ultimately results in a much stronger user experience. 
2. Privacy: No one wants their financial information and trading performance to be publicly available. 

The outsized success of Hyperliquid has proven that traders are willing to forgo financial privacy to avoid CEX custody and trade onchain with great UX & deep liquidity — but what if you could maintain custody without killing privacy, AND retain access to deep onchain liquidity, AND ensure optimal UX? 

This is where Synthetix Mainnet comes in. 

Offchain Order Matching: Privacy & Speed 

By early Q4, Synthetix will have launched the first Ethereum Mainnet settled CLOB perp exchange. Its hybrid onchain-offchain architecture mitigates Ethereum's block latency and high gas costs, allowing for a completely private HFT system to live on Mainnet. 

The main kicker for trading privacy comes from Synthetix’s decision to match orders offchain, harnessing an ultra-low latency matching engine to process orders in milliseconds, enabling deep liquidity and competitive spreads without the bottlenecks.

This kills two birds with one stone. 

Not only does offchain matching offer gasless order placement on Ethereum mainnet and abstract away settlement costs, but it also keeps all account-level trading data completely private. 

By once again building the first perp market on Ethereum, we are laser-focused on developing a high-performance, non-custodial perpetual futures platform on the most credibly neutral, battle-tested blockchain with the deepest possible liquidity.

And this is just the beginning… 

Developed from years of experience operating perpetual futures, the new Synthetix Mainnet architecture enables Synthetix to implement a unique set of trade-offs optimized for an L1 perpetual futures exchange:

• Offchain Order Matching: ultra-low-latency matching engine processes orders offchain in milliseconds, retaining trader privacy while maintaining deep liquidity and competitive spreads.
• Real Ethereum L1 Asset security: Fully onchain custody, deposits, and withdrawals. No Bridging. No rehypothecation.
• Composability: Compatible with all Mainnet assets and DeFi apps, which have the deepest liquidity and the most TVL by far.
• Community market-making and liquidation vault: No insiders. No back-room deals.
• Institutional-grade Centralised Limit Order Book (CLOB): CEX level throughput and latency.
• Multi-collateral and cross-margin with subaccount support: Post a portfolio of assets as margin, including yield-bearing collateral, keeping those assets productive while trading. 

We’ve made very deliberate trade-offs in our designs and architecture that will offer a unique and market-leading trading experience. 

We’ve combined the permissionless and non-custodial benefits of building on a blockchain, with high-performance requirements and trader privacy that an offchain matching engine permits us to offer.

But this isn’t just about beating other DEXs and offering groundbreaking features that our competitors can’t. This is about seeing through the final vision of Ethereum.

With Synthtix, the largest, most sophisticated financial ecosystem in crypto is about to become complete.

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