Short answer: Yes, they can leak—but what leaks is not your identity. It is your trading intent and strategy direction.
RFQ was designed to hide identity. You send a quote request, market makers give you quotes, and neither side knows who the other is before a trade. But "anonymous" does not mean "invisible." Your trading behavior still leaves traces.
What RFQ anonymity can do: blind spots in point-to-point quoting
CME's RFQ mechanism is anonymous. The requester does not need to reveal identity or whether they are a buyer or seller. Bybit's RFQ also supports anonymous mode. The requester and quoter cannot see each other, and only the price is shown.
The core value of this anonymity is: market makers do not know who you are, so they cannot adjust quotes against your specific position. If you are a Deribit whale and the market generally knows your position, market makers might quote worse prices against you. Anonymous RFQ is designed to solve that problem.
But trading intent cannot be hidden
The problem is that even if identity is hidden, your quote request content itself exposes information. For example, if you send an RFQ to "buy BTC call options, strike 60,000, expiry next Friday," market makers do not know who you are, but they can see someone is buying a large amount of options in that direction.
This is the so-called "information leak": your strategy direction, strike preference, and expiry choice become known to at least one market maker at the moment of inquiry.
The real risk for large strategies: "sniping" is not aimed at your identity
The biggest fear for large strategies is not "they know who I am," but "they know what I want to do."
Market makers are required to quote you, but they are not required to "forget" what you asked. If you send a rare multi-leg RFQ, market makers see that demand and may position themselves in the market first. By the time your order actually fills, the market environment may no longer be the same.
The real risk path:
- Leaking strategy direction: your RFQ content exposes your market view.
- Market makers position ahead: based on their own risk needs, quoters may make opposite trades on the main order book while quoting you.
- Market prices move early: before your strategy is fully executed, market prices may already have moved.
Practical advice: do not route every strategy through RFQ
- Standard single-leg or simple combinations: if liquidity is good enough (for example, at-the-money options that expire soon), trading directly on the order book is safer because prices are public and transparent, and you do not reveal your strategic intent to a single market maker.
- Complex multi-leg strategies: use RFQ, but try to choose a system that supports all-or-nothing full execution (such as CME's all-or-none mode) to avoid partial fills that expose your strategy.
How to check after execution
After the trade, check the gap between "fill time" and "quote time" in your order history. If the gap is very short (for example, a few seconds), your strategy intent was exposed only for a short window. If it took minutes or longer, your RFQ content stayed in the market long enough to create a larger leak risk.
