The trader everyone can see

Jeffrey Huang trades under the name Machi Big Brother. He is not anonymous, and neither are his trades. His wallet is labelled with his own name. Anyone can look it up right now.

Over roughly six months he lost close to 75 million dollars on Hyperliquid, mostly on leveraged $ETH longs. On-chain trackers have counted more than 240 separate liquidations on his account. Crypto has given him a nickname for it: the King of Crypto Liquidations.

Here is the part that matters. Every one of those positions was public while it was still open. Not the loss afterwards. The position itself. Trackers published his exact liquidation price to the cent, and the live market price sitting next to it. On one occasion the gap between the two was about 22 dollars. He sold three Bored Ape NFTs to cut a position and defend the rest, and that was public too.

It is easy to read that as a lesson about leverage. It is also a lesson about visibility. On a public perpetual futures exchange, your position is not private information. It is a live feed. And when the number that kills your trade is published for everyone, other people can aim at it. On Hyperliquid, informal groups of traders have organised specifically to push prices toward the liquidation levels of large, visible, overleveraged positions.

Perps are the biggest market in crypto

Perpetual futures, or perps, let you take a leveraged long or short position on an asset without ever holding it and without an expiry date. As long as you keep enough margin, the trade stays open.

They are the most traded product in crypto by a wide margin. Global volume passed 60 trillion dollars in 2025.

Here is the part most people do not know. Perps were not invented for crypto. The idea came from an economist in the early 1990s who was trying to solve a different problem: how do you trade things that are hard to price and hard to sell, like property? Traditional finance never built it. Crypto did, in 2016, and never gave it back.

So the instrument that now moves tens of trillions of dollars a year was originally designed for real world assets. It just ended up somewhere else.

The money that should be here is not here

For years there was a simple explanation for why large funds did not trade perps. In the United States, they were not really allowed to. That excuse is gone. In 2026, US regulators opened the door, and regulated perpetual futures now trade onshore.

The funds still are not here in any serious size. The reason is the thing that keeps happening to Machi Big Brother.

Large funds cannot afford to be watched. This is not a preference or a matter of taste. Regulators collect detailed position information from big traders and then keep it confidential on purpose, by law. When positions do become public, it is usually months later and in rough form. The whole system is built on the idea that the supervisor sees everything and the market sees very little.

A public perp exchange does the opposite. It publishes the position, the size, the collateral and the liquidation price, to everyone, instantly. A fund trading there is handing its book to its competitors. That creates a problem with its clients and its investors, not just with its profit and loss.

GameStop is the cautionary tale, and not for the reason people think

In January 2021, a crowd of retail traders on Reddit destroyed a hedge fund's short position in GameStop.

The part that gets forgotten is how they knew where to aim. The fund's positions were public because it was required to file them, and those filings could be read by anyone. That disclosure is what made the fund a target.

Now consider what the filing actually contained. It was a snapshot, weeks or months old, showing rough positions. That was enough to cost a fund billions of dollars.

A public perpetual futures exchange gives away far more than that, and it gives it away live. Exact size. Exact collateral. Exact liquidation price. Updated every second.

GameStop happened on a delay. On a transparent perp exchange, there is no delay.

Canton

Canton is a public blockchain with one important difference. On Ethereum or Solana, every transaction is visible to everybody. On Canton, a transaction is only visible to the parties involved in it. Everyone else sees nothing, not even that it happened.

Privacy on a blockchain usually sounds like something built for hiding. This is not that. This is how finance already works. Your bank knows your account. Your competitor does not. Your regulator can be given access. The public cannot.

Canton was also not a crypto project that later tried to attract institutions. It was built the other way round. The company behind it, Digital Asset, has been writing software for capital markets since 2014, and its technology was already running inside banks including BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs and HSBC before the public network existed.

That work has continued. Visa became a Super Validator on the network in March 2026. More significant is what DTCC is doing. DTCC sits behind the settlement of almost all US stock trading, and it is bringing DTC and Fed eligible securities onto Canton during 2026.

Read that again. The plumbing of the American stock market is moving onto this chain.

People already want this. They just cannot get it privately

You might assume perps on stocks and commodities are a niche idea. They are not.

On Hyperliquid, tokenized equities and commodities now make up 23 of the top 30 markets by open interest. Traders clearly want leveraged, round the clock exposure to gold, oil, indices and individual stocks, on chain, without owning the underlying.

Every one of those markets is fully public.

So the demand question is already answered. Nobody has answered the privacy question. That is the gap.

Edel Markets

Edel Markets is a perpetual futures exchange for tokenized equities and commodities, built on Canton.

The design goal is straightforward. The trading experience of a modern perp exchange, without publishing your position to the world. Your size, your margin and your liquidation price are visible to you and to the parties that need to see them. Not to a wallet tracker, not to a copy trading bot, and not to whoever is looking for stops to run.

One thing is worth saying plainly. Privacy on its own does not make a venue ready for large capital. Serious traders also ask about margin methodology, how liquidations are handled when markets gap, how the risk of a large default is contained, and whether there is real liquidity on the other side of the trade. Those are the right questions, and we are building for them rather than around them.

We are early, and so is Canton. Tokenized stocks are only now arriving on it, and the derivatives layer that should sit beside them barely exists yet. That timing is the opportunity. When the underlying assets live on a chain, the market for trading them with leverage belongs on the same chain, next to the collateral, rather than bridged in from somewhere else.

Perps were invented for real world assets. They spent a decade somewhere else. We are building the venue that brings them back, on the network that makes them usable by the largest traders in the world.