Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Google alumni unveil DeepSigma for real-world asset perpetuals

DeepSigma, a new decentralized exchange for real-world asset (RWA) derivatives, has launched a demo that lets users paper-trade perpetual futures on 77 markets, from US equities and indexes to commodities and Treasury yields.

Powered by the Cypherium blockchain, DeepSigma aims to address gaps in existing markets: traditional brokers may restrict trading outside market hours or by jurisdiction, while crypto-native perpetual exchanges often lack the liquidity, tools and user experience needed to support traditional financial assets.

“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 Sky Guo, CEO of DeepSigma and founder of Cypherium. “Real-world markets have different trading hours, liquidity conditions, pricing sources and regulatory considerations. We started DeepSigma with those differences in mind.”

The platform is designed to extend crypto’s perpetual futures model to traditional financial markets without tokenizing or taking custody of the underlying assets, the project notes. Its contracts use external price data to track real-world markets, enabling traders to gain long or short exposure without owning the assets themselves.

DeepSigma said it has been designed around US regulatory frameworks from day one, with a development team whose experience spans traditional finance, quantitative trading and technology companies including Goldman Sachs, Citadel Securities, Google and Uber.

Guo previously co-authored a paper on distributed ledger technology options for central bank digital currencies with Swiss National Bank official Thomas Moser. The wider leadership team includes Albert Xu as CFO, Chaoran Wang as CTO and Jenny Chen as chief quant director.

According to its technical whitepaper, DeepSigma plans to offer perpetual contracts with no expiration dates, using funding rates, oracle-based mark prices and an order book. Its matching engine and clearinghouse are designed to operate on the Cypherium blockchain, which combines proof-of-work with HotStuff-based Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus.

The platform also plans to support cross-chain collateral, including USDC from Ethereum and Solana, alongside risk controls such as partial liquidations, position limits, circuit breakers, automatic deleveraging and an insurance mechanism.

Beyond trading infrastructure, DeepSigma is developing an AI market analysis desk and natural-language assistant to help traders assess macroeconomic developments, earnings, interest rates and other market-moving events. The tools would provide portfolio-aware insights without having the authority to execute trades or control user assets.

Whether DeepSigma can compete with platforms such as Hyperliquid and Ostium will depend on execution, liquidity, oracle reliability and its approach to regulation, particularly for derivatives linked to securities.

“DeepSigma brings together two areas that have largely developed separately: the market structure and risk discipline of traditional finance, and the open infrastructure that has made on-chain perpetuals successful,” Guo said. “The opportunity is not to copy one market into the other. It is to build infrastructure specifically for where the two meet.”