Wall Street Veterans Unveil DeFi Platform for 77 TradFi Markets

Bridging Traditional Finance and Onchain Markets

Decentralized perpetual futures exchange Deepsigma recently unveiled its platform with a live paper-trading demo spanning 77 traditional financial markets. Developed by a team of alumni from Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, Google, and Uber, the platform allows traders to gain long or short exposure to U.S. equities, stock indexes, sector ETFs, commodities, and Treasury yields.

Rather than tokenizing, taking custody of, or taking delivery of the underlying assets, Deepsigma’s perpetual contracts track prices through external market data feeds. Built on the Cypherium Layer 1 blockchain, the project aims to bring the perpetual futures model to conventional financial instruments.

Sky Guo, CEO of Deepsigma and founder of Cypherium, said traditional assets present unique operational challenges compared with cryptocurrencies, including non-24/7 trading hours, fragmented pricing, and specific regulatory requirements.

“Crypto has already demonstrated the demand for perpetual markets, but you cannot simply take the same model and put a stock or commodity ticker on it,” Guo said. “Real-world markets have different trading hours, liquidity conditions, pricing sources, and regulatory considerations. We started DeepSigma with those differences in mind.”

The paper-trading platform currently supports contracts covering benchmark stock indexes including the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq Composite, Russell 2000, and Cboe Volatility Index (VIX). It also supports contracts with commodities such as crude oil, gold, silver, natural gas, and copper.

Technical Infrastructure and Risk Management

To address off-hours price movements and liquidity lapses in traditional markets, Deepsigma’s risk engine incorporates multi-source external price feeds, mark-price mechanisms to deter short-term manipulation, circuit breakers, partial liquidations, and an insurance fund. The platform operates on a central limit order book model paired with a clearing layer for margin, collateral, and settlement.

The interface also features an offchain artificial intelligence (AI) analysis tool designed to generate strategy insights without execution authority over user funds. Unlike fully permissionless crypto venues, Deepsigma is designing its system around U.S. regulatory frameworks.

The exchange is developing a decentralized identity framework utilizing zero-knowledge proofs. Meanwhile, the underlying Cypherium blockchain utilizes a hybrid proof-of-work and Hotstuff Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism, supported by four U.S. patents.