Sommet Labs Details Abyss Plans for Private DeFi Trading Through Midnight

Sommet Labs presented its plans for Abyss, a platform designed to coordinate DeFi positions across markets while using Midnight to protect the connection between users and their trading activity. In a newly published recording from Midnight LIVE at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, co-founder Sushant Kurren explained the proposed architecture, reported progress on test-network swaps, and answered questions about liquidity and processing speed. He appeared alongside CTO Guido De Vita.

Abyss Plans One Account for Positions Across DeFi

Sommet Labs describes Abyss as an onchain prime brokerage, a system intended to bring trading, collateral, and financing across existing protocols into a single account. Kurren illustrated the need with a trader who has collateral on Aave and an open position on Hyperliquid. To add margin, that trader may need to withdraw funds or borrow against the collateral, convert assets, and transfer them to the trading platform. Abyss aims to connect those operations across lending markets, exchanges, and other DeFi products.

Kurren compared the intended experience with a traditional brokerage account, where different financial instruments can be managed within a common margin framework. Professional market makers already build portfolio management systems for their own use, he explained, while Abyss aims to make similar coordination available through a shared product. The team had begun onboarding market makers, whose feedback included a request to protect information about their positions and the funds available to support them.

How Midnight Would Protect Abyss Users on Hyperliquid

The first privacy phase would create a separate Hyperliquid subaccount for each Abyss account. A user would deposit into Abyss on Midnight, and contracts on Midnight would direct contracts on Hyperliquid’s EVM environment to manage the corresponding account and its funding. The aim is to shield the connection between the original wallet and the trading account. Kurren clarified that the trades themselves would remain public: Abyss would seek to protect who is behind activity on Hyperliquid, while the exchange’s order book would remain visible.

A later phase would place multiple users’ positions under one shared Abyss account on Hyperliquid. Kurren connected that design to the growth of an anonymity pool, a group of participants whose activity is harder to distinguish from the outside. He argued that giving deposited capital uses such as trading and collateral management could encourage participation in the pool. In response to a judge’s question, he added that Abyss would rely on liquidity in existing markets such as Aave and Hyperliquid; the shared privacy pool would require its own gradual effort to attract capital and participants.

[NEWSBREAK]

Abyss Reports Testnet Progress and Examines Processing Speed

At the time of the presentation, Kurren reported that the prime brokerage infrastructure was deployed on Base but had not publicly launched, as the team was still working on privacy. A separate product, Abyss RFQ, was available on Midnight’s Stagenet for shielded and unshielded token swaps. RFQ stands for request for quote: users obtain trade offers from participants known as solvers. The system supports multiple solvers, and market makers can connect using the project’s developer tools.

The team also developed an Ethereum-connected private swap flow with Sig Network. Kurren described an operation routed to Midnight, where the swap takes place through Abyss before assets return to an Ethereum wallet selected by the user. He reported that the flow was running across Midnight Stagenet and Ethereum’s Sepolia test network, and mentioned Solana and other EVM networks as possible extensions.

During the judges’ questions, Kurren identified processing speed as an issue the team was investigating. He reported that a Stagenet transaction took more than 60 seconds, including proof generation and execution. To address that constraint, Sommet Labs was considering an application-specific chain or Layer 2 that would settle to Midnight, potentially using an EVM environment. The team had not announced a final architecture or a public launch date for the broader brokerage platform.