Everyone talking about dark pools now because Cz mentioned wanting to see a dark pool dex. I’m pretty sure this thought was inspired the James Wynn saga where everyone could see his massive trades on chain and target him. Cz was thinking about this as a solution for whales to open large trades on chain without being targeted but what nobody is talking about is the fact that dark pools are already WIDELY used on Solana just not for you or me 😅 You’ll never guess who has access to these dark pools.. Everyone’s favorite market maker Wintermute and other mms/big players. If you ever look at your transactions when trading large caps or even larger memes, many times you’ll notice your buy/sell never hits any liquidity pools, instead you directly swap with something by the name of Solfi or tessera(this is wintermute) or a number of others, these are dark pools. Now we don’t have exact numbers but it’s estimated that 70% of transactions on solana that take place in the very high liquidity pairs like sol/usdc are executed via dark pools. And 40% in other pools which probably includes any tokens that have a couple exchanges. The reason I started researching these pools was because I started noticing almost all of my transactions on $goat, $zerebro, and $fartcoin were never hitting LPs and I didn’t understand it. I mean millions of dollars in volume. That never sees an order book and if i’m not mistaken isn’t even accounted for by data tools like birdeye or moby… I even checked my highest volume transfer counterparties over the last couple years and most of mine(that aren’t meteora LPs i’m depositing into) are dark pools. That’s roughly $49 million dollars in volume just from me. There’s a lot more to this than I’m able to even cover here and I’m not an expert but it’s kind of wild how prominent these dark pools have become in the solana ecosystem and I’m still unsure of the consequences that come from it. There’s definitely some good things like better execution on trades but at what cost 🤷‍♂️?

@Lolpoppo_4 I have a feeling like half of fartcoins volume takes place in these pools but i could be wrong. I just know that 90% of my large transactions($20k+) go into them.

Went back on jupiter and picked a random transaction i’ve done over $20k and of course the whole transaction was executed via 2 dark pools lol… One was tessera(wintermute) and the other was Humidifi.