DeepSigma has launched a paper-trading demo covering 77 traditional financial markets, using patented blockchain technology to bring crypto-style perpetual futures to stocks, commodities and other real-world assets.

A team with backgrounds at Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, Google and Uber is developing a decentralized exchange designed to bring one of crypto’s most popular trading models into traditional financial markets.

The platform, called DeepSigma, has unveiled a live paper-trading demo supporting 77 real-world asset (RWA) perpetual contracts, spanning U.S. stocks, major indexes, commodities, sector ETFs and Treasury yields.

Powered by the Cypherium blockchain, DeepSigma aims to let traders take long or short positions on traditional assets without owning, tokenising or taking custody of the underlying instruments. Instead, its perpetual contracts track real-world markets using external price data.

The project brings together experience from both traditional finance and blockchain development. Its leadership includes Albert Xu, a former Goldman Sachs FICC portfolio manager; Jenny Chen, a quantitative macro trader who most recently worked at Citadel Securities; and Chaoran Wang, a former Google and Uber engineer who founded quantitative trading firm UmiUmi.

Leading the company is CEO Sky Guo, who also founded Cypherium, the Layer 1 blockchain powering the exchange.

Bringing Crypto Perpetuals to Traditional Markets Perpetual futures have become a major part of cryptocurrency trading, allowing traders to maintain leveraged market exposure without the fixed expiration dates associated with traditional futures contracts.

But applying the same model to traditional financial assets introduces a different set of technical challenges.

Unlike cryptocurrencies, which trade continuously, stocks and many other traditional assets operate within defined market hours. Their underlying markets can close overnight or over weekends, creating complications for pricing, liquidity and risk management on a platform designed for continuous trading.

“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,” said Guo. “Real-world markets have different trading hours, liquidity conditions, pricing sources and regulatory considerations. We started DeepSigma with those differences in mind.”DeepSigma’s demo currently covers markets including the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq Composite, Russell 2000 and VIX, alongside commodities such as gold, silver, crude oil, natural gas and copper.

To address the differences between crypto and traditional markets, the company is developing a risk framework that includes multiple external pricing sources, position and exposure limits, circuit breakers, partial liquidations and an insurance mechanism for stressed market conditions.

The exchange uses a central limit order book model, supported by a clearing layer responsible for managing positions, collateral, margin and settlement.

“The hardest part of bringing real-world assets on-chain isn’t creating another market symbol. It’s making sure the market still behaves sensibly when the underlying asset is closed, liquidity disappears or an external price moves sharply,” Guo said.

A Privacy-Focused Approach to Regulation Regulatory compliance is another area where DeepSigma is attempting to differentiate itself from fully permissionless crypto trading platforms.

The company says it has designed its approach around U.S. regulatory frameworks from the outset and is working with specialized digital-asset legal counsel. Part of that strategy involves developing decentralized identity infrastructure using zero-knowledge proofs.

Under the proposed system, participants would be able to demonstrate that they meet certain eligibility requirements without exposing the personal information behind those credentials on-chain.

DeepSigma describes the principle as “prove eligibility, not identity,” an approach intended to combine regulatory requirements with the privacy associated with decentralized financial systems.

The company has not presented this identity infrastructure as a completed feature of its current paper-trading demo.

The Patented Blockchain Behind DeepSigma DeepSigma runs on Cypherium, an open, permissionless Layer 1 blockchain founded by Guo.

The underlying blockchain technology is covered by four granted U.S. patents relating to consensus and associated blockchain systems.

Cypherium combines Proof-of-Work with a HotStuff-derived Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism. The blockchain is designed to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, with the goal of supporting high-throughput financial applications.

Guo is a named inventor on Cypherium’s patented technology. He also previously co-authored DLT Options for CBDC with Thomas Moser of the Swiss National Bank and has spoken at the United Nations Headquarters and Nasdaq.

Beyond its blockchain infrastructure, DeepSigma’s current trading terminal includes market data, technical indicators, asset-specific news, portfolio tracking and a competitive leaderboard.

It also features an AI Market Analysis Desk that can analyze markets and generate potential trading strategies. The AI component operates entirely off-chain and has no authority to execute transactions or move user assets.

For now, the platform’s publicly described trading functionality remains a paper-trading demo rather than a live exchange handling real-money positions.

DeepSigma’s broader ambition is to extend decentralized perpetual trading beyond cryptocurrencies, using infrastructure designed specifically for the pricing, liquidity, risk and regulatory requirements of traditional financial markets.

Contributed article. Not produced by the TNW newsroom and does not reflect the editorial stance of TNW.