Cryptographic Security Is Not Enough: Privacy Gaps in the Renegade Decentralized Dark Pool
Dark pools are designed to provide pre-trade privacy, liveness, and post-trade confidentiality - concealing order flow before execution and limiting information leakage after. Decentralized dark pools, such as Renegade, aim to replicate these properties without custodial risk, using secure multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs for private order matching and verifiable settlement. We show that Renegade's cryptographic guarantees do not deliver these dark pool properties in practice. MPC-with-abort ensures correctness but not fairness: a party may learn the match result and abort without penalty, breaking pre-trade privacy. We demonstrate that the protocol's discovery layer further leaks trading intent before MPC even begins, and that sustained probing via selective abort can probabilistically reconstruct counterparty order history, threatening post-trade confidentiality. We also show that the absence of input-consistency checks prior to MPC execution enables a griefing attack using invalid state commitments requiring no real token holdings that continuously locks honest users' wallets and wastes compute, breaking liveness under sustained conditions. We further analyze over 700,000 Renegade transactions on Base and probe the P2P layer, finding that the network is effectively centralized: 88% of traffic routes through a handful of relayers, with only four nodes sustaining the P2P layer. Since relayers hold their users' wallet state in plaintext, this concentration means the system operates as a centralized orderbook in practice - reproducing off-chain the information asymmetry that dark pools are designed to eliminate. Together, our results show that cryptographic privacy does not imply dark pool security: pre-trade privacy, liveness, and post-trade confidentiality each require additional protocol-level guarantees beyond MPC correctness.