Questions & Answers
Everything you need to know.
Deep technical documentation on protocol mechanics, auction flow, and settlement architecture.
UnleakTrade is a private OTC (Over-The-Counter) auction platform on Solana for trading any SPL (Solana Program Library) token (listed or unlisted) via private auctions, with attestation-verified liquidity and trustless, fully on-chain settlement.
Yes. UnleakTrade is live in beta on Solana Devnet at app.unleak.trade. You can open the app and explore it today.
To actually test the trading flows, though, you need Unleak USDC (uUSDC), a devnet-only test token that mimics USDC (not real USDC, no real-world value): request access and activate your waitlist spot, and 1,000 uUSDC are airdropped to your registered wallet. Everything runs on Devnet only, so no real funds are at risk.
Request access to join the early community and share feedback on Telegram.
Unleak USDC (uUSDC) is UnleakTrade's test version of USDC on Solana devnet: same 6 decimals, used everywhere the beta says USDC, and worth nothing outside it. It is not real USDC and cannot be bought, sold, or bridged.
After you activate your waitlist spot, 1,000 uUSDC are airdropped to the wallet you registered. This is the test token the beta runs on, and it's what lets you do real end-to-end testing (create RFQs, post bonds, commit and reveal quotes, and settle trades) rather than just browsing the app.
At today's default devnet parameters (which may change), 1,000 uUSDC is enough for roughly ~96 full RFQ cycles. The 1,000 figure is a testing allowance, not a trade-size guideline.
A few things to know:
• Connect the same wallet you registered when using the beta
• Distribution may show as pending briefly after activation; an empty balance right after activating is not a failure
• There is no faucet for this mint; if you run out, ask on Telegram
Requesting access makes you part of UnleakTrade's early community, the members who try the beta first and help shape what we build next. Controlled onboarding keeps the early network composed of serious makers, takers, and liquidity providers, and, since UnleakTrade relies on economic incentives, bonding, and private RFQ flows, helps prevent spam and ensures healthy early liquidity.
Requesting access also lets you:
• Try the beta today on Solana Devnet (no real funds or tokens involved)
• Receive 1,000 Unleak USDC (uUSDC) airdropped to your wallet after activation: the devnet-only test token required to trade in the beta (not real USDC, no real-world value)
• Secure early access to the app
• Signal interest to potential counterparties
• Become eligible to sponsor others
If you’ve filled the form but it doesn’t work, the most common reason is an invalid or missing sponsor address. Requesting access currently requires a sponsor: a wallet address that has already been granted access.
To fix the issue:
• Double-check that the sponsor wallet address is correctly formatted
• Ensure the sponsor has already successfully requested access
• If you don’t have a sponsor, you can use the following public sponsor address to join:
GhTppHPoSppnBurco1sPuYWyn3mejhsaRdRbt3dHtFyc
Most venues either execute in public (so size, timing, and intent leak) or rely on trust-heavy coordination. UnleakTrade's core differentiator is that it encodes the entire RFQ (Request For Quote) lifecycle into a verifiable on-chain state machine, and uses bonds + timeouts to enforce completion and penalize griefing. This matters for whales because the cost of "leakage" is usually not the fee: it's adverse price movement and being gamed.
No. We work on different layers of the same problem. Zama builds general-purpose confidentiality infrastructure based on FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption): a technology that lets smart contracts compute directly on encrypted data, across many applications and chains. UnleakTrade is not infrastructure; it's a purpose-built OTC/RFQ venue on Solana for executing block trades in any SPL token.
The practical differences follow from that:
• Scope: FHE is a platform many confidential applications can be built on; UnleakTrade is one venue with one job: private price discovery and guaranteed settlement for large or illiquid trades
• Privacy model: FHE keeps state encrypted end-to-end, even during computation; UnleakTrade uses commit/reveal to keep quotes hidden while takers compete, then settles deterministically on-chain
• Assets: trades run on any SPL token, listed or unlisted, with no wrapping into a confidential token standard first
• Enforcement: solvency is attested before a quote is accepted, and bonds put economic skin in the game on both sides, so no-shows and griefing are punished by the protocol rather than by reputation
So the honest answer is that the two are complementary, not competing. If you need end-to-end encrypted state and composable confidential DeFi primitives, that's the FHE thesis. If you need competitive, leak-resistant execution for size on Solana today, that's UnleakTrade.
There is no protocol-enforced minimum trade size anywhere on UnleakTrade, and none is planned. Both the taker fee (
taker_fee_bps) and the bond are set per-RFQ by the maker, with no protocol floor on either.
The ~$10,000 figure you may have seen is guidance, not a gate or requirement: it's advice about when an OTC auction is worth it versus an AMM, and it applies to production on mainnet, where amounts represent real value. Above that range, avoiding slippage and information leakage typically outweighs on-chain AMM execution; the exact break-even varies per RFQ, since each maker sets their own fee and bond.
On devnet, trades run on Unleak USDC (uUSDC), a test token with no monetary value, so no sizing guidance applies. Test any size you like.An AMM (Automated Market Maker) prices against a public pool and your trade is executed against a curve; large trades tend to pay explicit slippage and also reveal execution to the market. UnleakTrade instead runs a private auction where takers compete to fill a maker's request, and only the final settlement needs to hit the chain. That's typically better for large size because you're seeking a negotiated/competitive fill rather than pushing a pool price.
A DEX (Decentralized Exchange) is an on-chain exchange - often an AMM or an order book - where orders/swaps are executed via smart contracts. UnleakTrade is still on-chain for settlement, but it's not a "public order book DEX" pattern, it is an OTC/RFQ auction flow with commit/reveal and bonding to minimize information leakage and enforce fair behavior.
An RFQ is an on-chain object created by the maker that defines the trade request (tokens involved), the bonding requirement, and the timing windows. It is uniquely identified by
(maker, uuid) and stored in a dedicated on-chain RFQ account (a PDA = Program Derived Address).On UnleakTrade, the maker is the party who initiates the RFQ and later selects the winning taker. The maker creates the RFQ draft, publishes it, and after the auction they must fund their side of the settlement within the funding time window.
On UnleakTrade, takers are bidders: they respond to a maker's RFQ by submitting bids/quotes during the commit/reveal auction. If a taker is selected, they must fund their side of the settlement (and pay the protocol fee, in the RFQ's quote token) within the funding time window.
A facilitator is an optional participant who helps connect makers and takers (for example by sourcing liquidity or coordinating off-chain relationships around an RFQ). They do not submit quotes, select winners, or settle trades. They can be designated at the RFQ level by the maker and at the quote level by the taker.
Facilitator updates are state-gated:
• The maker can set/clear the RFQ facilitator while the RFQ is in
Draft, Open, Committed, or Revealed
• A taker can set/clear the quote facilitator while the RFQ is in Draft, Open, Committed, Revealed, or Selected
After settlement is completed, facilitator designation is effectively fixed and only reward claiming remains.A quote (or bid) is the taker's proposed execution terms for the maker's RFQ (the price they're willing to trade at for the specified pair/size). The auction is the competitive process where multiple takers submit quotes and the maker selects the winning one. UnleakTrade implements this with a commit/reveal flow: takers first commit a hash of their quote, then later reveal the details for validation.
Commit/reveal is a two-step auction design used to reduce copying and information leakage. In the commit phase, takers submit a hashed commitment (so the content isn't revealed). In the reveal phase, takers reveal the actual bid details and the program validates that the revealed quote matches the prior commitment. This protects bidders from having their quote instantly mirrored and helps keep the process fair for size.
The settlement engine is an on-chain Solana program that enforces the RFQ lifecycle, bond accounting, state transitions, and atomic settlement. There is also an off-chain component ("Liquidity Guard") that performs validation and generates signed attestations used during the process, but the final enforcement and settlement happen on-chain.
Before a taker commits a quote, the Liquidity Guard runs an automatic liquidity check that verifies the taker's balances cover the bond and the potential settlement. It then issues a signed attestation (an ed25519 signature) that rides in the same transaction as the on-chain commit; the program verifies this attestation, and commits without a valid one are rejected.
Zero-knowledge is UnleakTrade's long-term privacy model, but our first job is to bootstrap a real two-sided market (makers and takers with genuine volume) on security that is proven, cheap, and fast *today*. That's why liquidity is currently verified with ed25519 signatures rather than zero-knowledge proofs.
Before a taker commits a quote, the Liquidity Guard checks that their balances cover the bond and the potential settlement, then issues an ed25519 signed attestation that rides in the same transaction as the on-chain commit. Solana verifies this signature natively (via its built-in ed25519 program), and any commit without a valid attestation is rejected on-chain.
ed25519 is a battle-tested, widely audited signature scheme: extremely cheap and fast to verify, and it gives us tamper-proof, verifiable liquidity guarantees without the added latency, cost, and engineering surface of a full zero-knowledge system. In short, zero-knowledge is the destination, not the starting line: ed25519 lets us ship a secure market now.
FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) lets a program compute on data that is never decrypted. That is the strongest form of on-chain confidentiality, and genuinely impressive technology. It also carries real cost: computational overhead, added latency, and a dependency on a confidential token standard that assets have to be wrapped into first.
An OTC auction doesn't need permanently encrypted state. It needs quotes to stay hidden while takers are competing, so nobody can mirror a bid or trade ahead of size. Commit/reveal delivers exactly that: a hashed commitment locks the quote, the reveal proves it wasn't changed, and settlement is deterministic and auditable on-chain.
The trade-off is explicit: once a trade settles, it is a normal on-chain transaction. The protection is against leakage during price discovery, not permanent encryption of the record. For block trades, price discovery is where the money is lost. We picked the mechanism that fits the problem and ships fast on Solana, and we keep deepening trust-minimization from there. See Will UnleakTrade migrate to zero-knowledge, and when?
Liquidity Guard is an off-chain microservice that (1) verifies liquidity/solvency before commitment, (2) generates signed attestations for makers and takers, and (3) feeds validated actions to the on-chain Settlement Engine.
A REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) is simply an HTTP service interface; here it's used to request and receive the signed attestation material needed for the on-chain commit step.
A protocol fee is paid during funding/settlement: the selected taker deposits their settlement asset and pays a fee in the RFQ's quote token, which is transferred to the UnleakTrade treasury (minus any facilitator share). The rate is set per-RFQ by the maker as a
taker_fee_bps value and is charged on top of the quoted amount, so the maker receives the full quote.Facilitator rewards are optional and only exist on successful settlement.
A facilitator can claim a share of the taker fee only if:
• the RFQ facilitator address is set
• the selected quote facilitator is set
• both addresses are the same
When those conditions are met, treasury receives the taker fee minus facilitator share, and the facilitator claims the share after settlement via
withdraw_reward. By default, facilitator share is configured at 1000 bps (10%) of the taker fee (configurable by protocol settings).A bond is a USDC amount posted by *each participant* to make griefing expensive and force timely completion. Bonds are held in an RFQ-owned USDC token account (an ATA = Associated Token Account) and are returned on successful settlement. If someone fails to do their required step in time, their bond can be slashed (routed entirely to the protocol treasury, never to the counterparty). Counterparties have skin-in-the-game.
The amount is set per-RFQ by the maker, not by the protocol. Each RFQ carries a single
bond_amount: the maker picks it when creating the RFQ, can still change it while the RFQ is a Draft, and it is locked when the RFQ is opened. The same value applies to both sides, so whatever the maker posts is what every committing taker must post too. There is no protocol schedule indexed on trade size and no protocol floor, which is also why the figures you see quoted are illustrations rather than a tariff. See What's the minimum trade size?
In the devnet beta, the bond is denominated in Unleak USDC (uUSDC), the same devnet-only test mint you receive from the waitlist airdrop, which is not real USDC and has no real-world value.If one party fails to act (for example, not funding or not revealing), they lose their bond. Bonds are never paid to the counterparty. Each participant posts their own bond, and on a normal successful settlement each participant simply gets their own bond back. If a participant fails to complete a required action within the protocol's deadlines (for example, missing a funding or reveal deadline), their bond can be slashed according to the program rules. When slashing happens, the slashed bond is not redistributed to the other trading party; it is handled by the protocol (for example routed to the protocol treasury / fee destination) rather than being shared with the counterparty.
TTLs (TTL = Time To Live) are deadlines that define the allowed time window for each phase of the RFQ lifecycle. In the Settlement Engine, TTLs include
commit_ttl, reveal_ttl, selection_ttl, and fund_ttl. If a TTL expires, the RFQ can be marked expired/aborted/ignored, and bonds are distributed according to the rules.After the maker selects a winning taker quote, both sides deposit the required assets during the funding phase. Once funded, the program executes the swap atomically: it transfers the quote asset to the maker, the base asset to the taker, transfers the fee to the treasury (minus any facilitator share), and returns both bonds (unless a timeout rule triggered slashing).
The design is escrow-style and program-enforced: assets are deposited into program-controlled accounts for the purpose of atomic settlement, then released according to the RFQ state machine. This is not "custody" in the traditional centralized sense, but it is still smart-contract escrow: the trust assumption is the correctness/security of the on-chain program.
Yes. Zero-knowledge is UnleakTrade's committed direction, and the roadmap is deliberately sequenced: build the market first, then deepen trust-minimization.
Today's ed25519 attestations rely on the Liquidity Guard as an off-chain attester. The guarantees are enforced on-chain, but the solvency check itself is trusted to that service. The zero-knowledge migration replaces that model: participants will be able to prove solvency without revealing balances or trading strategy, and without a trusted off-chain attester.
From a user's perspective the experience stays the same (verified liquidity, private auctions, atomic settlement) while the underlying trust assumptions get progressively stronger. We move to zero-knowledge once the market and its participants are established, so the upgrade lands on a live, liquid venue rather than an empty one.
UnleakTrade is built on Solana because it uniquely aligns with where crypto liquidity, real-world adoption, and performant blockchain technology are converging:
• Liquidity is actively growing on Solana: Solana has seen extraordinary on-chain usage and economic value, consistently leading in daily transactions and decentralized exchange activity compared to other blockchains, evidencing deep and active markets that matter for OTC flows.
• Favourable macro & institutional context: Solana has attracted major partners (e.g., payments and stablecoin infrastructure integrations like Visa, Western Union, Circle) and increasing institutional interest, which supports larger capital flows and real financial market use cases.
• High performance with very low fees: Solana’s technology delivers high throughput (thousands of TPS and sub-second finality) and transaction costs that are fractions of a cent, enabling fast, predictable execution without the congestion or gas spikes common on older networks.
• Modern consensus & architecture: Solana’s hybrid Proof-of-History (PoH) plus Proof-of-Stake (PoS) design is optimized for parallel processing and low latency, making it ideal for high-frequency or large-scale financial applications like OTC auctions.
• Native support for zero-knowledge innovations: Solana is pioneering *ZK Compression* and other zero-knowledge extensions at the base layer, enabling dramatically lower state costs, privacy primitives, and scalable proofs without relying on external rollups or secondary chains, a strong technical fit for UnleakTrade’s ZK-assisted liquidity model.
Together, these factors make Solana a strong foundation for UnleakTrade: it offers deep liquidity, real adoption signals from both retail and institutional players, extremely efficient execution, and evolving zero-knowledge capabilities that align with our privacy and performance goals.