zkTrade by Relipa Is Officially Enlisted In Voting Ballot Of Project Catalyst Fund 15

zkTrade, a zero-knowledge trading infrastructure developed by Relipa’s RnD team, has officially qualified for the Voting Ballot of Project Catalyst Fund 15. The proposal is now subject to community voting as part of Cardano’s decentralized funding and governance process.

This achievement confirms zkTrade’s relevance as a foundational DeFi primitive for Cardano and highlights Relipa’s growing role as a blockchain development company focused on building production-ready Web3 infrastructure.

Project Catalyst and Fund 15: Where Cardano’s Future is Decided by Its Community

Project Catalyst is Cardano’s decentralized innovation engine, a governance and funding framework where the community collectively determines:

• Which infrastructure should be built
• Which ideas deserve ecosystem resources
• How Cardano should evolve in the long term

Rather than relying on centralized foundations or private investors. Project Catalyst places decision-making power directly in the hands of ADA holders.

Now in Fund 15, Project Catalyst continues to support projects that solve real problems, demonstrate technical credibility, and continue long-term value to the ecosystem. Projects included in the voting ballot are expected to address real constraints in Cardano’s current architecture and contribute reusable building blocks for future development.

zkTrade: Building The Privacy Layer Cardano Is Missing

Most decentralized exchanges today expose more information than users realize. Public order data, including price, size, and execution intent, creates an environment where Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) extraction, front-running, and sandwich attacks are not edge cases, but systemic risks.

On Cardano, the situation is even more constrained:

• Fully on-chain orderbooks face cost and performance bottlenecks
• There is no native privacy-preserving trading layer
• Developers lack reusable tooling to integrate zero-knowledge proofs into trading workflows
• Advanced trading strategies remain difficult or unsafe to deploy

zkTrade is designed to close this gap. It is a Cardano-native zero-knowledge trading layer that enables private order placement and execution while preserving full on-chain verifiability. Sensitive information such as balances, order size, and price limits remain confidentia, yet every action can still be independently validated.

• Orders are submitted as encrypted commitments with accompanying ZK proofs
• On-chain contracts verify correctness without revealing underlying data
• An off-chain matching engine processes orders according to publicly defined rules
• Matching results are proven and settled on-chain
• Users can place, cancel, and monitor orders with minimal latency

Together, these components form a cohesive execution pipeline that mirrors familiar trading behavior while removing information leakage at every step.

Why zkTrade Is a Strategic Investment for Cardano

zkTrade addresses a structural limitation in today’s Cardano DeFi landscape: the absence of a privacy-preserving, verifiable trading layer that can support sophisticated market behavior.

• Establishes a native ZK trading primitive for Cardano
• Directly mitigates MEV and information leakage risks
• Enables advanced order types and algorithmic strategies
• Allows auditors and users to verify fairness cryptographically
• Provides an SDK so other teams can build private trading products without rebuilding ZK logic

As a result, zkTrade strengthens Cardano at the protocol level, improving market integrity, enabling higher-value use cases, and reducing duplicated engineering effort across the ecosystem.

Relipa’s Role and Long-Term Direction

Relipa participates in zkTrade as the core development and technical research team, drawing on experience as a blockchain development company. Relipa’s work on zkTrade focused on:

• Designing the on-chain and off-chain system architecture
• Applying zero-knowledge proofs to real-world trading use cases
• Ensuring practical feasibility and reliability in production environments

The project reflects Relipa’s long-term direction in blockchain and Web3 development, with an emphasis on building foundational infrastructure that can be reused and extended across the ecosystem. Rather than treating zkTrade as a standalone application, the team approaches it as a core primitive that addresses structural gaps in Cardano’s DeFi landscape.

Now listed in the Project Catalyst Fund 15 voting ballot, zkTrade enters a community-led evaluation process in which ADA holders review the technical foundation and potential contribution to the Cardano ecosystem. The outcome of this process will help determine whether privacy-preserving and verifiable trading infrastructure becomes part of Cardano’s long-term development roadmap.

📑 For more information about zkTrade Proposal: Link

📲 Vote via the Project Catalyst app: Tutorial