Hassan Maishera
On Tuesday, the LayerZero team announced via X that it has launched ATLAS (Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement), a universal backend built to power the future of global markets.
ATLAS is a headless exchange built on Zero to power the next generation of global markets. It collapses matching, clearing, settlement, and risk into a single integrated technology stack and combines the performance and fairness of a traditional exchange with the verifiability and self-custody of a decentralized exchange.
And because it’s built on Zero, ATLAS delivers unrivaled performance, with sub-millisecond latency and throughput capability an order of magnitude greater than current market demand.
ATLAS connects three parties:
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Trading venues, who use ATLAS to launch Open or Institutional trading environments without building infrastructure from scratch.
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Market creators, who define the assets that trade, including perps, spot, stocks, commodities, bonds, memes, and predictions.
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Market makers, who provide the liquidity for efficient pricing.
There is no ATLAS frontend or consumer application. Users trade through trading venues, who own the experience and distribution and can capture the majority of the economics.
Underneath these venues, ATLAS serves as a universal backend. Zero serves as the final source of truth for ownership at scale, and the entire product is connected to ZRO.
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.
LayerZero is an interoperability protocol designed to facilitate seamless communication between different blockchains. It aims to create a unified, interconnected blockchain ecosystem where assets and data can move freely across various networks.
LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol designed for lightweight message passing across chains. LayerZero provides authentic and guaranteed message delivery with configurable trustlessness. It is a “blockchain of blockchains” that allows other blockchain networks to communicate directly and in a trustless manner.
LayerZero’s key feature is Ultra Light Nodes (ULNs). These smart contracts run on each blockchain and act as endpoints for cross-chain communication. ULNs verify the validity of transactions and messages from other chains using block headers and transaction proofs, ensuring security and efficiency.
ZRO trades at $1.21, up 10% in the last 24 hours. LayerZero supports any blockchain that can run smart contracts, such as Ethereum, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Fantom, and other chains. LayerZero also supports non-EVM chains like Aptos. These so-called omnichain applications should become a key layer of a multi-chain future, where different blockchains interact simultaneously.
LayerZero aims to create the optimal interoperability solution for blockchains with seamless and trustless cross-chain transactions.
