Financial markets infrastructure developer LayerZero has announced ATLAS (for Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement), a universal “headless exchange” built to power “the future of global markets.”
Based on the company’s Zero blockchain, it combines matching, clearing, settlement and risk into a single integrated technology stack and provides the performance and fairness of a traditional exchange with the verifiability and self-custody of a decentralised exchange (DEX).
Founded in 2021 by three graduates of the University of New Hampshire, the company’s original work was on secure inter-chain messaging. Later, backed by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, its focus moved to blockchain platforms for the financial markets. It launched its base protocol and ZRO crypto token in 2024, and its Zero blockchain earlier this year.ATLAS connects three types of market participant:
- Trading venues, which use ATLAS to launch open or institutional trading environments without building infrastructure from scratch.
- Market creators, which define the assets that trade, including perps, spot, stocks, commodities, bonds, memes and predictions.
- Market makers, which provide the liquidity for efficient pricing.
ATLAS offers no frontend or consumer application. Users transact through other trading venues, which own the experience and distribution, and can capture the majority of the revenue. As such, ATLAS supports both open (permissionless, for all participants) and institutional markets:
- Open ATLAS is the standard configuration for crypto-native trading applications, prediction markets, and other teams building open financial products. A trading venue can launch a frontend, connect to ATLAS, select or create markets, and begin serving users without having to build the underlying exchange.
- Institutional ATLAS uses the same engine as Open ATLAS to give institutions/exchanges the infrastructure they need to offer 24/7 global markets. The base infrastructure remains verifiable and connected to Zero, while markets reflect the rules the institution chooses to enforce.
Underneath these venue types, ATLAS acts as a neutral, performant engine: any market, anywhere in the world, 24/7, with industry-leading performance, all running on Zero, a heterogeneous blockchain that separates execution from verification. Validators on the beacon chain verify zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs rather than re-executing the work.
At launch, ATLAS will be initially provisioned for 200,000 transactions per second. Supporting ATLAS, Zero removes the replication bottleneck: Block Producers execute ATLAS workloads and generate proofs, while Block Validators verify those proofs without repeating the work. Different Zones run concurrently, so market activity does not compete with payments or general-purpose applications for one block.
ATLAS charges one all-in trading fee. Trading venues in Open ATLAS receive a tier-based rebate ranging from 20% to 65%, based on their ZRO cryptocurrency stake and/or aggregate volume. Larger trading venues earn more because they contribute more distribution and commit more capital to the system.
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