Today we introduce ATLAS (Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement), a universal backend built to power the future of global markets.
Six years ago, we developed incredible conviction in the belief that the world of settlement ledgers would be multi-polar, and the world’s asset base would rapidly expand. In the six years since, we’ve seen this thesis play out. Stablecoins sat at $5 billion in 2020. They’re now at $320 billion. RWAs were not even a real asset class, with just $16 million worth of gold onchain. They’ve grown 2,000x since then. All this used to happen on a single chain; now, trading volume and payments flow diversifies further and further each year.
The world’s global asset base is only growing, and faster than ever. This rapid expansion will create equally aggressive demand for fair and performant global markets.
It is difficult to overstate the economic surface of markets. There are trillions of dollars in value in the world exchanging hands on a daily basis, leading to quadrillions of settlements in just US stock markets alone. The DTCC processed $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions during 2025 and provided custody and asset servicing for $114 trillion. Foreign-exchange markets turn over $9.6 trillion each day. Over-the-counter interest-rate derivatives add another $7.9 trillion of daily turnover. Derivatives markets generate more than $8 trillion in daily notional volume.
The opportunity grows dramatically larger when expanded to include other countries, along with tokenized assets like perps, prediction, risk, and derivatives.
The world’s financial system has seen many inflection points, all ushered in by technical innovation: the ticker tape, electronic trading, retail trading applications. The scale of the moment we find ourselves is orders of magnitude more profound: we stand at the threshold of a once-in-a-lifetime transition.
We believe that in order for that transition to take place, we need technology that is as performant as existing platforms and can meet the requirements of both open and institutional markets.
So we built ATLAS.
01. How We Got Here
LayerZero builds infrastructure for the future of finance. We started with "Better Money Technology," enabling assets to move and interact across any chain through the OFT Standard, which has facilitated $290 billion in volume spanning stablecoins, tokenized stocks, and more across 160+ chains.
But tokenization creates a new challenge. While assets are now global, 24/7, and programmable, the market infrastructure—stock trading, forex, and settlement—remains trapped in legacy systems.
Better Money Technology is in need of Better Markets Technology.
To unlock the next era of finance, matching, clearing, settlement, and risk must evolve to match the speed of the assets they trade. Trading hours must be 24/7, and market access must be borderless.
On February 10, we announced Zero, a multi-core blockchain designed to compete with internet-scale systems on performance and cost while preserving permissionless validation. Zero was announced around three high-leverage use cases: general-purpose computation, payments, and global markets.
After researching and building alongside the world’s largest financial institutions, it’s clear that markets are long overdue for an upgrade.
Enter ATLAS.
02. ATLAS: An Overview
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:
- Trading venues, who use ATLAS to launch Open or Institutional trading environments without building infrastructure from scratch.
- Market creators, who define the assets that trade, including perps, spot, stocks, commodities, bonds, memes, and predictions.
- 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, 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.
03. Why Headless?
In open markets, the easiest way to launch a new trading venue is to build on top of an existing exchange. In order to capture any economics, these trading venues must charge an incremental fee on top of whatever the exchange charges. This means they’re always competing with the exchange’s native frontend; sophisticated users avoid these additional fees by circumventing the trading venue entirely and going directly to the exchange.
Institutional markets face a different challenge. Buying a share of stock today requires separate systems to match the buyer and seller, clear and settle the trade, and manage the risk. Each is typically operated by a different organization, carries its own fee, and every handoff has to be reconciled. This structure is the bottleneck to markets running continuously and across borders.
Most trading venues don’t want to rebuild exchange infrastructure from scratch. And institutional venues won’t place their core business on rails owned and maintained by a direct competitor. ATLAS eliminates these tradeoffs by being completely headless, with no frontend or consumer application of its own. It supports both open 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.
Trading venues should not have to build on infrastructure that siphons their own users away from them. ATLAS makes this possible: instead of having to compete with the underlying exchange on price, trading venues can now focus on delivering the best possible product experience.
Underneath these venues, ATLAS acts as a neutral, performant engine: any market, anywhere in the world, 24/7, with industry-leading performance, all running on Zero.
04. Unrivaled Performance
ATLAS offers CEX-level execution, DEX-level auditability, open settlement, programmable assets, and infrastructure cheap enough to support the volume of global finance and internet scale workloads:
- In our current environment meant to mirror a public deployment, ATLAS delivers sub-millisecond median latency, 1.418 ms p95 latency, and 2.641 ms p99 latency. In a colocated environment, we expect to reduce latency to double-digit μs.
- At launch, ATLAS will be initially provisioned for 200,000 transactions per second.
Market activity is spiky. Information changes trigger bursts of orders and liquidations. A price moves, market makers cancel and re-quote, positions cross margin thresholds, and every participant asks for updated market data at once.
This is why scaling to internet-level bandwidth at the blockchain level is so important. This is why we built Zero.
Underneath ATLAS, Zero removes the replication bottleneck: Block Producers execute ATLAS workloads and generate proofs, while Block Validators verify those proofs without repeating all of the work. Different Zones run concurrently, so market activity does not compete with payments or general-purpose applications for one block.
05. Economics
Because ATLAS has no frontend of its own, every user arrives through a trading venue, who capture economics on trading volume.
ATLAS charges one all-in trading fee. Trading venues in Open ATLAS receive a tier-based rebate ranging from 20% to 65%, based on ZRO stake and/or aggregate volume. Larger trading venues earn more because they contribute more distribution and commit more capital to the system.
Because the trading venue’s economics are embedded in ATLAS’ trading fee, it does not need to place a second toll above an exchange fee to capture economics: its own frontend becomes the native route into the market.
Once the trading venue receives its rebate, the remaining share of the fees are split between market creators and ZRO:
- 25% of post-venue economics goes to the market creator.
- 75% of post-venue economics goes to buying and burning ZRO.
This fee split means entities can specialize and monetize in ATLAS where they have expertise. A trading venue focused on distribution can focus exclusively on this endeavor. A firm with expertise in equities, credit, commodities, or prediction markets can operate as both a trading venue and a market creator. A market maker can provide liquidity without owning either role.
06. The role of ZRO
The token across all of Zero is ZRO:
- ZRO secures Zero through delegated proof of stake and serves as the network’s gas asset.
- ZRO holders delegate stake to the Block Validators that verify the network.
- ZRO also governs protocol upgrades and the addition or modification of Zones.
ATLAS extends the role of ZRO in a few new ways.
Trading venues stake ZRO to qualify for higher fee rebates. These tiers start relatively modestly and increase to up to 1% of ZRO supply at the highest level.
ATLAS offers a single all-in fee for trades. Once trading venues receive their rebate, 25% of the remaining fees go to the market creator; the other 75% goes to buying and burning ZRO.
The same asset secures Zero, serves as its gas token, qualifies trading venues, and captures economics from the activity those venues create.
07. Looking Ahead
ATLAS is the embodiment of our belief that the world’s rapidly expanding asset base needs a neutral, performant engine that underpins the venues that will build across markets spanning the globe. Any market, anywhere in the world, 24/7, with industry-leading performance, all running on Zero.
First was Better Money Technology. Now, there will be Better Markets Technology.
ATLAS will hold the world’s markets.
