Welcome
Welcome to the technical documentation for SnarkSide — a fully encrypted, intent-based perpetual futures exchange built from first principles using zero-knowledge proofs, off-chain multiparty computation (MPC), and stealth margin vaults. This system represents a foundational rethinking of how decentralized perpetuals should be architected in the presence of adversarial market participants, MEV extractors, and transparency-based attack vectors.
SnarkSide was not created as a fork or a wrapper. It was designed from the ground up over two years of deep protocol engineering and cryptographic system design. The goal: to enable trustless, verifiable trading without disclosing any information that could be used against the trader.
This documentation is not a marketing asset. It is a blueprint for builders, reviewers, and integrators — a complete walk-through of every layer of the SnarkSide protocol stack.
What is SnarkSide?
SnarkSide is a decentralized, non-custodial perpetual futures exchange where:
Users submit encrypted trade intents, not public orders.
Matching occurs off-chain, within an MPC-based relayer network.
Final settlement is verified on-chain using zkSNARKs.
Margin accounts are managed via UTXO-style shielded vaults.
Liquidations are triggered via non-interactive ZK proofs, not oracle-published thresholds.
There is no orderbook. There is no mempool leakage. There are no transparent liquidations or publicly visible wallets. Yet every state transition is provably correct.
SnarkSide operates at the intersection of high-assurance cryptographic engineering and decentralized derivatives market design.
Why Encrypted Perps Matter
Traditional perp DEXes suffer from an unfixable flaw: complete transparency of market structure. This includes:
Mempool-visible orders that leak intent.
Wallet-linked position state that can be analyzed or spoofed.
Liquidation thresholds that act as price targets for adversarial traders.
LPs whose rebalancing behavior becomes a source of alpha leakage.
This architecture rewards MEV searchers, liquidation hunters, and oracle manipulators — not legitimate traders or liquidity providers.
This is not a side effect. It is a systemic design failure.
SnarkSide addresses this not by optimizing around the flaw, but by removing it entirely:
All market-facing actions begin as encrypted statements of intent.
All matching is performed off-chain, with verifiable privacy guarantees.
All margin accounts are abstracted behind zero-knowledge commitments.
Every trade settles as a succinct proof, not as an observable transaction.
The result is a new class of DEX — one where trading does not require exposure.
Design Motivations
SnarkSide is not a general-purpose privacy protocol. It is a domain-specific financial coordination system, designed to handle adversarial behavior in decentralized perp markets. Its architecture is shaped by a few key motivations:
1. Frontrunning is not an edge case — it’s the baseline.
Every order submitted to a public mempool is exploitable. Intent-based ZK submissions ensure that information is never available before settlement.
2. Liquidation data is toxic.
Publishing a wallet's liquidation threshold is the same as inviting manipulation. SnarkSide uses private margin states and ZK-triggered liquidation logic to decouple user solvency from public state.
3. Market makers should not be forced into latency games.
By removing observable flow, SnarkSide levels the field between LPs and searchers. Liquidity is rewarded via encrypted, verifiable contribution — not timing.
4. Verifiability should not require surveillance.
SnarkSide preserves the core ethos of DeFi — public verifiability — without requiring participants to be observed. All computation is provable. None of it is visible.
SnarkSide is built for traders, quants, and protocol engineers who recognize that transparency is not always aligned with fairness. It introduces a new model: constraint satisfaction as market coordination — a world where correctness is enforced cryptographically, and information never moves unless it must.
Proceed to the next section to learn how this model begins — with encrypted trade intents.
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