Hyperliquid has become a leader among on-chain platforms for futures, surpassing $DYDX through one radical move — complete transparency. Each pending order is linked to a wallet, and its profit, losses, and liquidation level are accessible to the entire network.
Hyperliquid has no asymmetry in information access among participants, and judging by the rapid growth, the scheme works. But is it really the best?
Jeff Yan, founder of Hyperliquid Labs, is confident that it is. In a recent thread on X, he compared such architecture to the rebalancing of ETFs and public stock markets. His thesis is simple: transparency helps market makers identify safe activity, narrow spreads, and create liquidity even when working with whales worth billions.
But the Variational team, which is developing the new derivative protocol Omni based on Arbitrum, has a different perspective. They are betting on complete privacy.
Omni offers privacy instead of transparency
Critics like Thomas Uma and Edward Yu (co-founder of Variational) point out an important drawback: transparency benefits not those who earn in the market, but those who simply follow the movement.
"If you are trading profitably and have an advantage, you need to act secretly. As soon as the market reads your intentions, your advantage disappears," Yu said in an interview with Blockworks.
For example, if someone sees your activity in advance, they can preempt, play against, or simply cancel the order.
$OMNI , which today announced the attraction of $1.5 million in strategic investments from Mirana Ventures, Caladan, Zoku Ventures, and other funds, offers a completely different approach. This is a peer-to-protocol format platform, explained the project's CEO Lukas Schurmann in a conversation with Blockworks.
Here, users send trade requests directly to the integrated market maker Omni Liquidity Provider (OLP). There is no public order book. No one sees each other's intentions. Each trade remains private.
When a trader enters the platform, they are assigned a separate smart contract to store all funds.
"We call it a settlement pool. Essentially, it's an isolated account for margin that lies between the user and OLP," Schurmann explains.
The entire architecture of Omni is built to protect the trader. This is a philosophical alternative to the Hyperliquid hypothesis. Schurmann shared that the system grew from solutions for institutional trades through RFQ.
"We took all our experience, infrastructure, and developments in liquid markets and embedded it into OLP. But then we realized that all of this could also be useful for retail users," he says.
Privacy as the foundation of a new revenue distribution model
The closed structure of Omni provides traders not only anonymity but also access to the protocol's income. Depositors in the OLP vault will be able to earn from market making in the future, while traders will be reimbursed for part of their losses.
"We do not want to sell orders to third parties who simply profit from them. We want to return that value to the users themselves," the team explains.
At first glance, it resembles Hyperliquid's HLP model. But the philosophy here is entirely different. In Hyperliquid, capital is distributed among integrated market makers competing for narrow spreads in the order book. The profit or loss from these trades is then returned to HLP contributors.
Omni directs liquidity to exchanges like #Binance , Bybit, and even Hyperliquid itself, where it acts not as a market maker but as a taker. This helps avoid toxic deals and aggressive competition that arise from passive orders in transparent systems.
This approach has a downside, namely storage risk. Funds leave the protocol and depend on the API and rules of third-party exchanges, as in the case of the synthetic dollar from $ENA .
The Variational team reduces storage risks by controlling all liquidity placements and publicly tracking balances and trades related to the OLP strategy. Yes, there is additional operational risk, but the team believes it pays off through more accurate order execution.
Omni is part of a broader trend where infrastructure belongs to users. Schurmann is confident that such a model can scale liquidity even for lesser-known assets that usually inhabit AMM pairs on Uniswap or Radium.
All trades go through a competitive RFQ system without gas. OLP immediately covers all pairs.
"We automatically pick up such pairs as soon as they appear and place them on the platform along with hundreds of others. The main thing is that OLP starts market making from day one," he noted.
According to him, the ability to revive illiquid markets is the key expertise of the Variational team.
It's hard to imagine anyone displacing Hyperliquid, but Omni aims to carve out its own niche for retail traders who have an advantage.
