A trader can call the market correctly and still get punished because their plan became visible too early.
That is the part of onchain trading I keep coming back to. Imagine I want to exit a position if a price level breaks while I'm away. I can set the instruction in advance, but if the full order is exposed before the trigger, I have handed searchers information they never needed. They can prepare around my exit before I even get to act. The price call might be right. The execution can still be ugly.
This is why Nillion's Covenants caught my attention.
With Dusk on Ethereum, the idea is to seal the instruction first and attach it to a condition. The instruction stays encrypted while the market moves. Once the relevant data feed confirms the condition, a distributed node network can release what was sealed. No single keeper needs to hold my order and decide when to reveal it.
That changes a very specific moment: the time between deciding what I want to do and the moment the instruction is allowed to become readable.
I also think the boundary matters. Dusk is not a promise that every part of a trade is invisible. Nodes can still see the condition they're evaluating, and once an instruction opens, execution risks don't disappear. Making conditions private even to those nodes belongs to a later phase.
For me, that distinction makes the design more interesting, not less. @Nillion is tackling the exposure of intent before a trigger, instead of pretending every market problem is solved by encryption.
A trader should not have to announce the move just to make sure it happens later.
#nil $NIL @Nillion
That is the part of onchain trading I keep coming back to. Imagine I want to exit a position if a price level breaks while I'm away. I can set the instruction in advance, but if the full order is exposed before the trigger, I have handed searchers information they never needed. They can prepare around my exit before I even get to act. The price call might be right. The execution can still be ugly.
This is why Nillion's Covenants caught my attention.
With Dusk on Ethereum, the idea is to seal the instruction first and attach it to a condition. The instruction stays encrypted while the market moves. Once the relevant data feed confirms the condition, a distributed node network can release what was sealed. No single keeper needs to hold my order and decide when to reveal it.
That changes a very specific moment: the time between deciding what I want to do and the moment the instruction is allowed to become readable.
I also think the boundary matters. Dusk is not a promise that every part of a trade is invisible. Nodes can still see the condition they're evaluating, and once an instruction opens, execution risks don't disappear. Making conditions private even to those nodes belongs to a later phase.
For me, that distinction makes the design more interesting, not less. @Nillion is tackling the exposure of intent before a trigger, instead of pretending every market problem is solved by encryption.
A trader should not have to announce the move just to make sure it happens later.
#nil $NIL @Nillion