Renegade and Penumbra are the two relatively mature private DEXs to launch soon. Both projects are very innovative and only rely on cryptographic assumptions for privacy (no TEEs). Below are some notable differences in their tech stack.
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Penumbra is a Cosmos appchain. Renegade is a dapp on Starknet
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Penumbra’s matching engine runs on-chain. Renegade’s matching engine runs off-chain; counterparties perform order matching via MPC.
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Penumbra is peer-to-pool. Renegade is peer-to-peer
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Penumbra has batched auctions. Trades across all pairs are executed once per block, in batches. In Renegade trades happen continuously in real-time.
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Penumbra is a hybrid, order-book-like AMM, Renegade is a CLOB with midpoint peg orders.
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In Penumbra, the aggregate data (total liq in a pool, total amount in a batch swap) is public, while individual data (each user’s contribution to a batch) is private. Everyone’s privacy guarantees increase as more people contribute to a batch. In Renegade, privacy guarantees don’t depend on external factors but to enjoy full privacy, traders are expected to run their own relayers and actively participate in MPC. They can’t just “set and forget” orders. Full privacy in Renegade is tailored for power users like whales, OTC desks, MMs, etc.
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Penumbra’s privacy design (aggregate data is public, individual data is private) is a potentially generalizable design and can perhaps be used to enable other private apps such as auctions, voting, liq staking etc. Renegade’s design is very app-specific, tailored for darkpools.