Renegade
Renegade, founded in 2022 by Chris Bender and Joey Kraut in San Francisco, builds an on-chain dark pool for anonymous crypto trading. Its flagship venue, Renegade Dark Pool, uses multiparty computation and zero-knowledge proofs to match orders without revealing size or direction pre-trade, settling directly on-chain with self-custody on Arbitrum and Base. Orders are pegged to the real-time Binance midpoint to eliminate price impact and MEV. Headquartered in San Francisco with a lean engineering team, Renegade emphasizes cryptography, market microstructure and privacy-preserving settlement rather than custodial matching. Backed by Dragonfly, Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan with $3.4M seed funding, the team contributes to private DeFi research. Expect a highly technical culture that prizes low-level cryptography, precise execution design and building durable privacy for professional traders.