Most blockchain companies build a chain first and hunt for users second. LayerZero ran that sequence backward. Before bringing its new Layer-1 to market, the team walked the architecture into Citadel Securities. The New York Stock Exchange and the DTCC saw it too. Then it asked a blunt question.
“We have this. Does this matter to you?” Simon Baksys told Genfinity’s Ryan Solomon. Baksys serves as Chief Business Officer at LayerZero. The answer came back unequivocally yes.
That conversation produced Zero, the Layer-1 LayerZero announced in February 2026. It also produced the announcement Baksys broke down in this interview. LayerZero is launching ATLAS, the Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement engine, later this fall.
LayerZero Announces ATLAS 🌐 Infrastructure for Onchain Capital Markets
— Generation Infinity (@Genfinity) August 25, 2026
LayerZero is expanding into capital markets with ATLAS, a new headless exchange for the future of global markets.
• Zero: 2M+ TPS architecture
• ATLAS: sub-millisecond latency
• Open and institutional… pic.twitter.com/KN6rmgx7gK
The interoperability business that funded the thesis
LayerZero started in 2021 with a narrower problem. Moving value between blockchains was ugly, and connecting applications across chains was worse. Wrapped assets and middle chains papered over the gap. Consequently, the team chose general message passing instead: a standard way to move packets of data between any two chains.
The funding followed quickly. LayerZero raised roughly $280 million across its rounds, with a16z and Sequoia leading or co-leading each one. Coinbase, PayPal, and Franklin Templeton joined as participants. The 2023 Series B valued the company at $3 billion. Headcount grew from about 40 people to roughly 150 over Baksys’s three years there.
Product market fit landed somewhere the team did not initially target. Stablecoins turned out to be the most permissionless assets in crypto, and they move cross-chain constantly. LayerZero grew almost linearly alongside them. Today the protocol exclusively powers native mint and burn for several major issuers. That list includes Tether’s USDT0, PayPal’s PYUSD, the Global Dollar Network’s USDG, Ethena, and ether.fi.
The scale is real. Baksys puts monthly movement at $10 billion to $20 billion in these assets. That works out to 80% to 90% market share in any given month. Messari’s research supports the picture. As of May 31, LayerZero supported 61.2% of issued stablecoin supply. Additionally, more than 733 OFTs now run in production. Tether cited $70 billion in USDT0 cross-chain transfers when it invested in February.
Baksys frames that decade as one wave. “Stablecoins have proved, $300 billion plus now, that it has sort of a place in this world,” he said. He calls it the rise of permissionless money.
An accidental research breakthrough
Sitting at the bottom of the stack gave LayerZero an unusual vantage point. The team integrated every major blockchain architecture in existence. Along the way, it found critical bugs in most of them. Baksys argues nobody has gone deeper on architectural tradeoffs, because every design sacrifices something across performance, security, and scale.
Then the research team published QMDB, or Quick Merkle Database. It was meant as a paper, not a product. QMDB replaces the traditional Merkle Patricia Trie with an append-only structure tuned for SSDs. Benchmarks showed 2.28 million state updates per second and in-memory Merkleization at 2.3 bytes per entry. The team tested workloads up to 15 billion entries, roughly ten times Ethereum’s 2024 state.
The industry noticed immediately. Tempo built its entire storage layer on QMDB. More breakthroughs followed in networking, compute, and zero-knowledge proving. LayerZero’s technical positioning paper details the rest. SVID handles data dispersal above 1 GB per second. FAFO schedules parallel execution past 1.2 million EVM transactions per second. Jolt Pro delivers GPU-accelerated proving.
“I think instead of just sort of giving it to the world, maybe we should do something about this ourselves,” Baksys said. That decision became Zero.
Why a Layer-1 is not a detour
Plenty of observers read the L1 launch as a pivot away from interoperability. Baksys rejects that framing. LayerZero’s customer on the interop side has always been the asset issuer. Blockchains are simply the channels that distribute an asset’s utility. Building one more channel extends the stack rather than replacing it.
Zero targets more than 2 million transactions per second at roughly one ten-thousandth of a penny per transaction. At those prices, gas stops functioning as a design constraint. The chain also builds in privacy through zero-knowledge proofs and targets agentic commerce directly.
The obvious question is who needs that throughput. Tokenizing a bond certainly does not. High-frequency trading does. For reference, Baksys cites the New York Stock Exchange at roughly 2 million transactions per second. NASDAQ runs above three million messages per second.
That is why the stealth conversations happened first. Institutions told LayerZero the same thing repeatedly. They could not run capital markets workloads onchain, because the systems simply did not allow it. In February, Citadel Securities made a strategic investment in ZRO. The DTCC, Intercontinental Exchange, ARK Invest, Tether, and Google all joined the effort. LayerZero also formed an advisory board including Cathie Wood, ICE’s Michael Blaugrund, and former BNY digital assets head Caroline Butler.
ATLAS and the rise of permissionless markets
LayerZero did not want to ship another general purpose chain and hope developers showed up. Instead, the team moved up the stack toward the use cases that actually need the performance. ATLAS is the first result.
Baksys describes it as an onchain, all-encompassing stack spanning risk, credit, matching, clearing, and settlement. Latency runs under one millisecond. He puts throughput at hundreds of thousands of matched orders per second. He calls that combination 200x to 400x faster than anything on the market today. Citadel, the DTCC, and ICE are building alongside LayerZero.
The timing tracks a second wave. Just as stablecoins validated permissionless money, perpetual futures validated permissionless markets. Onchain perp DEXs cleared roughly $2.41 trillion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Regulation is catching up too. In May, the CFTC approved the first perpetual futures contract on a regulated US exchange.
“Just the way that stablecoins proved and validated the need for permissionless money, perpetual futures have validated the need for permissionless markets,” Baksys said.
The world’s markets are undergoing a once in a generation transition.
— LayerZero (@LayerZero_Core) August 25, 2026
We’ve spent the last year building ATLAS (Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement), a first-of-its kind, headless exchange designed for the future of global markets. It combines the performance and… https://t.co/eULEygTZq8 pic.twitter.com/KVtObpkj3E
Traditional exchanges are data businesses, not trading businesses
The sharpest argument in the interview concerns exchange economics. Most traditional exchanges do not actually make their money on trades. They make it on data. The trade itself gets sliced across the financial services industry, so no single participant captures much of it.
Perpetual futures exposed how much that fragmentation costs. When matching, clearing, and settlement all happen in one venue, the operator captures far more of the trade. ATLAS packages that integration as a configurable end-to-end stack. As a result, exchanges get a path back to being trading businesses.
Baksys says the market is already moving that way on its own. Incumbents are quietly working out how to cut each other out of the flow. They want efficiency on one side and a larger share of the value on the other. LayerZero’s pitch is that it makes the rebuild easy instead of multi-year.
Two markets, one engine
ATLAS ships in two configurations. Open ATLAS serves permissionless markets, where anyone anywhere can access the venue and trade. Regulated ATLAS accounts for what institutions actually require, including KYC, AML, and fairness obligations.
That split matters more than it sounds. Compliance and legal clarity now sit at the foundation of every serious institutional deployment. However, forcing regulated participants into a permissioned silo cuts them off from open liquidity. Running both environments on one engine avoids that tradeoff. Baksys calls it a grand ambition, and he is not wrong.
Interoperability is the reason it holds together
Here is where the story closes its loop. LayerZero is not betting that Zero becomes the only chain that matters. Users will stay fragmented across ecosystems, and Baksys says the team is not naive about that.
Native interoperability turns that fragmentation into a feature. LayerZero already connects Canton, Solana, Ethereum, and more than 170 other networks. ATLAS runs on Zero, and Zero connects to all of them. Therefore a trader can hold collateral on Solana and trade against a perpetual or spot market on ATLAS. Alternatively, a firm can trade on ATLAS and settle out on Canton.
“That is actually where this kind of comes back together,” Baksys said. The L1 is not orthogonal to the interop business. It is an extension of it.
The next twelve to eighteen months
Baksys expects the pace to accelerate from here. Full CFTC approved perps would reset how the industry thinks about trading. That means all US investors, across every asset class. The current regulatory posture in Washington makes that plausible.
He also expects the throughput ceiling to keep rising. Onchain migration will stay gradual at first, so nobody should expect three million transactions per second next year. Agentic trading changes the math though. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has talked about needing 50 million to 100 million transactions per second. Those are the volumes he anticipates. Cloudflare handles roughly 20% of internet content delivery.
Legacy blockchain designs cannot follow that curve easily. Baksys notes that Ethereum’s ten year roadmap includes changes not far from LayerZero’s architecture. Ten years is the problem, and the merge showed how slowly these upgrades land. Blockchains are genuinely hard to upgrade once they ship.
His near-term forecast is more concrete. Tokenized real-world assets sit around $30 billion to $40 billion onchain today. “By this time next year we’re at a hundred billion dollars onchain easily,” he said.
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