Private Data Availability on Celestia: How Hibachi Built a Privacy-First Perpetuals Exchange

• Privacy without compromise: Traders get CEX-level privacy and performance with DEX-level verifiability and pseudonymity
• Celestia as private infrastructure: The DA layer works for encrypted data, not just public
• ZK with SP1 makes it practical: Modern proving systems are finally fast and cheap enough
• New design space: Private DA enables new applications impossible with only public data

In May 2025, pseudonymous trader James Wynn lost nearly $100 million when his $1.25 billion leveraged Bitcoin position got liquidated on Hyperliquid. It wasn't just bad timing that killed the trade. Because every move was visible on-chain, other traders could see his exact position, liquidation price ($105,179), and portfolio status in real-time. They knew exactly where to push the market.

When your trades are public, you're not just trading against the market—you're trading against everyone who can see your position.

This is the challenge Hibachi set out to solve: How do you build a high-performance decentralized exchange that gives traders the privacy they expect from Binance or Coinbase, while maintaining the verifiability that makes blockchain uniquely valuable?

The answer, you should know by now, is CLOBs on blobs—specifically the novel use of Celestia's data availability layer.

Traditional exchanges have one of two options:

• Full transparency: Every trade visible on-chain (bad for traders)
• Full opacity: Centralized black box (bad for trust)

If you're a whale sizing up a position and want to chip away at the book for good execution, as soon as someone sees that about to happen, other investors can rush in, leaving you with a worse execution price.

Market makers consistently cite three concerns:

• Strategy exposure: Competitors can reverse-engineer trading algorithms
• Security risks: Large positions make traders targets
• Front-running: Visible orders get exploited by MEV bots

Celestia is a modular blockchain that specializes in best-in-class data availability (DA).

Key benefits:

• 95% cheaper than storing data on Ethereum
• Mammoth blocks for massive throughput: Celestia can handle 2MB blobs, enabling applications that generate high numbers of transactions per second
• Data availability sampling (DAS): The breakthrough that lets light nodes verify data is available without downloading entire blocks

But standard Celestia usage means all data is public—which brings us back to the privacy challenge.

Celestia is designed as a neutral data availability layer. But this neutrality is its strength. Celestia accepts any data blobs, encrypted or not.

Hibachi leverages this by posting encrypted blobs instead of raw transaction data, effectively turning Celestia into a private data layer while maintaining all its availability guarantees.

The Private Data Availability Proxy is an official Celestia tool that enables privacy-preserving data availability. It's part of Celestia's ecosystem, allowing applications like Hibachi to post encrypted data while maintaining verifiability.

Key features:

• Drop-in compatible: All existing Celestia APIs work unchanged
• Transparent operation: To one who holds the encryption key, it just looks like normal Celestia. To everybody else it's encrypted data.
• Parallel processing: Encryption happens asynchronously to avoid bottlenecks

Hibachi's breakthrough is using Celestia as a private data layer. Here's how it works:

Post Encrypted Blobs Instead of Public Data

Instead of posting raw trades to Celestia, Hibachi encrypts the entire exchange state before posting as a blob on Celestia. Today, Hibachi owns the decryption key, but that will change.

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Ensure Honesty

While the data is encrypted, Hibachi generates ZK proofs using SP1 that verify:

• All trades followed exchange rules
• Proper order matching occurred
• Users actually signed their transactions

These proofs—which now take just 10-15 minutes to generate versus 8 hours in 2019—are posted on-chain, allowing anyone to verify the exchange is operating correctly without seeing individual trades.

Hibachi will soon upgrade to give each user their own decryption key. This will allow each user to decrypt only their state and validate their transactions without decrypting anything else.

High-Performance Matching Engine

• Written in Rust for microsecond-level latency
• Centralized sequencer for speed (like traditional exchanges)
• FIFO order matching preferred by institutional market makers

ZK Verification Layer (SP1)

• Proves correct execution without revealing trades
• Costs $1.20 per 1000 trades

Celestia for Private DA

• Encrypted blobs store exchange state
• Users can always reconstruct their positions; enables exit scenarios if exchange goes down

The technological advances made this possible:

• ZK proof performance: From 8-hour to 10-minute proving times
• Celestia's throughput: Enough capacity for institutional volumes
• Developer tools: SP1 makes ZK painless

Hibachi processes millions in daily volume while giving traders the privacy they demand. But the bigger picture is even more compelling—private data availability could become the standard for financial applications on blockchain.

Want to launch your own private application with Celestia DA? Gelato's Rollup-as-a-Service platform makes it simple:

• One-click deployment with Celestia integration
• Enterprise-grade infrastructure for institutional use cases
• Fully managed nodes and monitoring

Private Data Availability represents a fundamental breakthrough for on-chain applications. By combining Celestia's scalable DA layer with zero-knowledge proofs from Succinct, projects like Hibachi are proving that we can have both transparency and privacy.

As the technology matures and costs continue to drop, we expect private DA to become the standard for many financial applications.

Want to build your own application using Celestia DA on Gelato RaaS? Reach out to the team to launch your rollup with support for private data availability configurations and enterprise-grade infrastructure.