Macauley Peterson

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Hyperliquid has become the dominant venue for onchain perpetuals, leapfrogging <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/dydx">dYdX</a> by embracing a radical idea: full transparency. Every resting order is hash-linked to a wallet, whose P&amp;L and liquidation level are visible to the network. This “L4” order book is more granular than TradFi’s L3 venues, which conceal trader identity, positions or leverage levels.



Hyperliquid’s radically transparent market structure has no informational asymmetry between participants — and given its stellar growth, it’s working. But is it optimal?



Jeff Yan, the founder of Hyperliquid Labs, argues yes. In a recent <a href="https://x.com/chameleon_jeff/status/1929753039969440212">X thread</a>, he likened the design to ETF rebalances and electronic lit markets in equities. His thesis: Transparency lets market makers identify non-toxic flow, tighten spreads and scale liquidity, even for billion-dollar whales.



Yet, Variational, the team behind a new derivatives protocol on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a> called Omni, is betting on the opposite design choice: total privacy.



Critics like <a href="https://x.com/ThomasUhm/status/1929170772095815702">Thomas Uhm</a> and Edward Yu (Variational’s co-founder) <a href="https://x.com/mr_plumpkin/status/1929059419326918822?s=46">pointed out</a> a potential flaw: Transparency benefits uninformed flow — not alpha traders. “If you’re a profitable trader with edge, you want to move in stealth,” Yu told Blockworks. “Otherwise, the market will price in your impact the moment your intent becomes visible.” For example, “if someone can see your flow ahead of time through L4 data, they can frontrun, fade or cancel. Your alpha disappears.”



Omni, which announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in strategic funding from Mirana Ventures, Caladan, Zoku Ventures among others, is a peer-to-protocol trading venue, CEO Lucas Schuermann explained to Blockworks.



Users RFQ directly against an integrated market maker — the Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP). There’s no public book. No shared intent. Every fill is private.



When a trader joins Omni, they receive a segregated individual smart contract to hold all their funds. “We call it a settlement pool — essentially an escrow account for the margin that sits between the user and OLP,” Scheurmann said.



Omni is explicitly designed to shield traders. It’s a philosophical fork from the Hyperliquid hypothesis. Schuermann explained that the architecture evolved from institutional RFQ rails: “We essentially took all of our experience and infrastructure and market making liquid products…and we put that knowledge into OLP,” Schuermann said. “But after building all this infrastructure, we realized it could solve problems for retail.”



This private structure enables more than just discretion — it also redistributes protocol revenue. OLP vault depositors <a href="https://docs.variational.io/variational-omni/about-omni/the-omni-liquidity-provider-olp#how-olp-is-funded">will eventually</a> earn market-making profits, while traders receive partial refunds on losing trades. “We don&#8217;t want to sell the order flow to a third party who&#8217;s going to extract value. We want to give it back to users.”



This may sound similar to Hyperliquid’s HLP model, but the design philosophies differ sharply. Hyperliquid’s HLP vault allocates capital to in-protocol market makers who compete to quote tight spreads on the order book, with profits or losses passed back to HLP depositors. By contrast, the OLP vault routes liquidity to external venues — including Binance, Bybit and even Hyperliquid itself — where it acts as a taker, not a maker. This lets OLP sidestep the toxic flow and predatory dynamics that can come with posting passive quotes, especially on transparent books.



It does introduce custodial risk for liquidity providers, comparable to holders of Ethena’s synthetic dollar product: Funds leave the Omni protocol and rely on third-party exchange APIs and account controls.



Variational mitigates this risk by maintaining control over those deployments and publicly tracking all balances and trades for the OLP strategy. The added operational risk is compensated by what the team believes is materially better execution.



Omni is part of a broader movement: user-owned infrastructure. And Schuermann believes this model can scale liquidity — even for the long tail of assets, which are usually related to AMM pools like Uniswap or Radium.



Omni routes trades through a competitive, gasless RFQ pipeline where OLP quotes all pairs.&nbsp;



“We pick these up automatically amongst many others, and list them along with hundreds on our platform, but the key thing is OLP market makes them from day one,” he said, noting that making illiquid products liquid is part of the Variational team’s core expertise.



So while it’s hard to see anyone dethroning Hyperliquid right now, Omni may hope to carve out a new lane, one built for retail flow with edge, where alpha is protected and profits flow back to users.



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