Complete Transparency of Trading Background: A New Attempt at Public "Commercial Ledger"

In the world of decentralized finance ( DeFi ), every transaction is recorded on an immutable public ledger that anyone can verify. We are accustomed to seeing records of each exchange on some decentralized exchanges, but this information is usually limited to the level of "a transaction occurred."

For a long time, the attribution of transactions has largely relied on internal systems or centralized back-end processing of projects, resulting in the so-called "growth black box": while the transactions themselves can be verified on-chain, the sources of promotion are usually counted off-chain. This practice is not accidental, but rather due to technical and cost considerations. On mainstream public chains, adding additional identifiers to each transaction significantly increases gas fees and may also pose security challenges, which is why many projects choose to store their "commercial ledgers" off-chain.

A certain decentralized trading platform operates based on its self-developed underlying blockchain network, allowing users to engage in perpetual contract trading. Unlike other platforms, it chooses to make key business data and trading logic public on-chain, achieving comprehensive transparency from financial transactions to growth attribution, making the exchange's "backend" intuitively presented as a traceable growth map.

Public "Business Ledger": Growth Sources Are Clear at a Glance

The data dashboard of this platform is comparable to a real-time "war room". It not only displays macro trends but also precisely shows which wallet address, what tools were used, and at what time the market changes were driven. This approach involves structuring source information into the protocol path, primarily focusing on two dimensions:

1. Builder( Order Level ): Record the tools used for placing orders in the order parameters. This allows for comparison of transactions, fees, and retention by tool, and enables source attribution.

2. Referral( Account Level): Binding the referral relationship at the account level, discounts and commissions are settled on-chain according to the agreement rules. This allows for evaluating promotional effectiveness based on on-chain settlement data, facilitating budgeting and ROI assessment.

How to link trading with growth?

Scenario Example A( Builder | Order Level )

Trader Bob places an order using developer David's "TradePro" tool, with the order carrying David's address ( and the builder parameter ); the protocol automatically records this address and the corresponding fees on the chain and completes the distribution according to the rules.

Scenario Example B( Referral | Account Level )

Trader Alice registered using promoter Emma's referral code, establishing a verifiable on-chain referral binding between Alice's account and Emma; thereafter, Alice enjoys a fee discount on every transaction, with the system statistically calculating the discount at the account level and automatically distributing commissions to Emma.

Trustless mechanism for growth contribution (

When "growth attribution" migrates from off-chain to on-chain, the entire value chain changes. We can observe this from three dimensions: rules, settlements, and data.

1. Rules: From "Variable Interpretation" to "Protocol Layer Rules" The key logic is solidified into contracts, executed collectively by the network; using code constraints instead of temporary interpretations enhances the neutrality and predictability of the rules.

2. Settlement: From "Manual Approval" to "Automatic Clearing" Taking Builder) order level ( as an example: Users first set "maximum fee authorization" for the developer address, and each subsequent order carries the builder parameter. The protocol completes the revenue sharing settlement on-chain without any manual intervention.

3. Data: From "Promotional Report" to "Traceable Ledger" All key actions—placing orders, canceling orders, clearing, applying discounts—are recorded on-chain, and anyone can independently verify them in the public ledger, no longer relying on one-sided claims.

This transformation has brought about several direct impacts:

• To developers )Builder( and promoters )Referral(: Returning to the essence of contribution Automatic settlement based on on-chain contributions, independent of relationships or offline statistics, making it clear who creates value. Outstanding contributors can "vote with code" instead of "lobbying with PPT."

• Project Operations and DAO Governance: From Subjective Judgment to Data Consensus Make decisions based on unified metrics and discuss cost reduction. For example, the "Builder user retention rate" dashboard can visually display the differences in user quality brought by different tools.

• For ordinary traders: Cut through the noise with facts Can independently identify "who is leading the rhythm, which tools are effective", and reduce the impact of opaque information.

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The Cost of Transparency and the Boundaries of Privacy

However, any technological paradigm is a double-edged sword. As transparency is pushed to the extreme, new risks and challenges emerge:

1. Strategy Leakage and Alpha Decay: The Erosion of Trade Secrets For professional traders and developers, when their trading patterns and tool logic are clearly tracked, their profit Alpha is exposed to the sunlight, which can be easily copied and imitated, leading to a rapid failure of the strategy.

2. Precision Sniping and Market Manipulation: A Transparent Hunting Ground The intentions of large traders in opening positions have become obvious, which may lead to them being maliciously followed or having their position information exploited by counterparties for precise strikes, increasing the risks of large capital operations.

3. Financial Privacy Spillover: Public "Wealth Stripping" The user's trading history and profit and loss status ) PnL ( are fully disclosed, and the ecological panel will aggregate liquidation events to form a leaderboard; however, this also exposes the address and nominal losses, which is more likely to attract hackers, phishing, and even offline security threats.

) Future solution direction

To address these risks, the industry has turned its attention to verifiable privacy technologies represented by zero-knowledge proofs ###ZKP(. Its core objective is to prove to the protocol that a certain contribution was indeed generated by a specific promoter or tool, without disclosing the identity or strategy details of the trader, and to complete on-chain settlement based on this.

This pathway provides a clear technical direction to achieve the ideal state of "both verifiable and protective." However, challenges regarding cost, latency, and anti-witchcraft aspects of this technology still require significant engineering refinement.

Conclusion: Reconstruction of Business Models

This attempt extends the DeFi principle of "trustless" from the transaction level to the source level, demonstrating what protocol-native growth is: it places the closed loop of "customer acquisition - transaction - profit sharing" entirely on-chain, making it both traceable and verifiable, laying the foundation for a fairer incentive mechanism.

However, this design that attributes growth to being on-chain also raises a core challenge: how to better protect individual strategies and privacy without sacrificing verifiability. Only when the "traceable ledger" and "anonymous rights" coexist harmoniously can the growth mechanism be considered to have completed its thorough migration from off-chain to on-chain.

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