From CryptoPotato · By Bridgit Murphy
ZENDEX is a decentralized exchange that’s specifically designed for professional capital and private execution. It just announced live testnet trading and a core community-building phase following the completion of a full security audit by Hacken and Dual Defense.
The testnet will roll out gradually across multiple phases, which include points incentives. It will be followed by seeded liquidity and a live private DEX mainnet trading venue.
Mainnet and subsequent (ZENDEX V2/V3) launch phases are included in the roadmap toward private EVM liquidity aggregation and advanced on-chain ZK-DeFi execution functionality. Day-one ZENDEX DeFi operations are anchored by a permanent ZEN-denominated fee converter that converts every fee collected by ZENDEX into ZEN, the Horizen ecosystem’s legacy utility asset.
The ZENDEX fee splitter will then transparently distribute ZEN between liquidity providers, treasury operations, and Horizen’s existing ZEN Staking Contract. This is intended to create a long-term utility and tokenomic flywheel.
With ZEN serving as a legacy zero-knowledge utility asset aligned with Horizen’s long-term vision for private computation and EVM verifiability, ZENDEX is engineered to address many structural weaknesses of public on-chain trading.
The Transparency Barrier in Public-Chain DeFi
Now, it’s important to note that public blockchains expose every trade, strategy, and treasury movement. This is a well-known industry reality that this transparency has contributed to keeping significant institutional liquidity off-chain while, at the same time, putting retail traders at a disadvantage through extractive MEV practices.
ZENDEX is designed to shield trade sizes, execution intent, and sensitive trading activity in order to significantly reduce exposure to front-running, sandwich attacks, and other forms of extractive MEV while maintaining deterministic settlement. The model is intended to enable both retail and institutional participants to execute trading activity without exposing sensitive information to external observers unnecessarily.
Dual-Engine Execution: ZK-AMM & Private Order Book
ZENDEX achieves private, high-throughput execution. To do so, it unifies two core trading primitives within a single zero-knowledge framework.
The Shielded ZK-AMM
Essentially, this is a private automated market maker built on constant-product pricing. Positions, liquidity deployments, and swap volumes are represented through opaque commitments. The rules for maximum slippage are enforced through Noir-based zero-knowledge circuits.
The Private Limit Order Book
Makers submit hidden limit orders as private commitments, which brings DeFi execution that’s inspired by dark pools. The protocol is designed to reduce information leakage prior to settlement while preserving market functionality and efficient execution.