LayerZero launches ATLAS exchange infrastructure as ZRO jumps 16%

LayerZero has unveiled ATLAS, an exchange infrastructure layer built on its Zero blockchain for crypto trading platforms and financial institutions, while ZRO has climbed more than 16% following the announcement.

LayerZero said ATLAS, short for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity and Settlement, will serve as a backend for trading venues without operating a consumer-facing exchange of its own, allowing exchanges, brokers and financial firms to keep control of their users and interfaces.

https://t.co/VPz65GGwRa

— LayerZero (@LayerZero_Core) August 25, 2026

The system brings trade matching, clearing, settlement and risk management into a single stack, functions that financial institutions often handle through separate infrastructure. LayerZero plans to launch ATLAS later this year.

Built on Zero, the layer 1 network LayerZero introduced in February, ATLAS will use the blockchain’s zero-knowledge proof architecture to verify trades onchain while handling workloads designed for financial markets.

The Zero network was introduced alongside involvement from Citadel Securities, ARK Invest, Intercontinental Exchange and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. As previously reported by crypto.news, Zero was designed to scale to as many as 2 million transactions per second while separating transaction execution from verification through zero-knowledge proofs.

ATLAS gives trading venues their own front end

Under the headless exchange model, ATLAS will provide the trading engine while companies building on it manage the product that customers actually use.

LayerZero said the setup removes the need for operators to build exchange infrastructure from scratch or depend on backend technology controlled by a competing exchange. Trading venues can connect their own applications to ATLAS, select markets and handle customer distribution while the underlying system processes trades and settlement.

The infrastructure will support two configurations. Open ATLAS will be available for crypto applications, prediction markets and other public financial products, while Institutional ATLAS will allow operators to apply their own access and trading requirements.

Both will use the same underlying engine, according to LayerZero, although institutional market operators will determine which participants can trade and what rules apply to individual markets.

ATLAS is being built to connect three groups. Trading venues will operate the customer-facing platforms, market creators will decide what assets and products can trade, and market makers will supply liquidity.

Market creators will be able to establish markets covering spot crypto assets, perpetual futures, stocks, bonds, commodities, meme tokens and prediction contracts.

LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino said the infrastructure was designed as a neutral backend for an asset market that increasingly trades continuously and across multiple venues.

“The world’s global asset base is expanding faster than ever before. It is globally accessible, continuously available, and includes an increasingly large number of assets with sufficient depth and liquidity to build meaningful markets around,” Pellegrino said.

“We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all.”

LayerZero said its current ATLAS environment has produced sub-millisecond median latency, while p95 and p99 latency reached 1.418 milliseconds and 2.641 milliseconds, respectively. The company plans to initially provision the system for 200,000 transactions per second at launch.

ZRO will secure Zero and determine ATLAS rebates

ZRO will have several functions across Zero and ATLAS, adding uses for the token outside LayerZero’s existing interoperability network.

According to LayerZero, ZRO will secure Zero through delegated proof-of-stake and serve as the blockchain’s gas and governance token.

Trading venues operating through ATLAS can also stake ZRO to receive higher fee rebates. The highest rebate tier can require a stake equal to as much as 1% of the token’s total supply.

Open ATLAS will charge a single trading fee, with venues receiving rebates between 20% and 65% depending on their ZRO stake, trading volume or a combination of the two.

After the venue rebate is deducted, LayerZero said 25% of the remaining fee revenue will be paid to the market creator. The other 75% will be used to purchase ZRO and permanently burn the acquired tokens.

The model gives ZRO another fee-linked mechanism after LayerZero recently tied parts of its existing infrastructure revenue to token purchases. LayerZero said in August that excess revenue from new Stargate OFT transfer fees would be used for ZRO buybacks.

ZRO rose sharply after ATLAS was announced, gaining more than 16% over 24 hours to trade near $1.26, according to price data cited in the original report.

LayerZero expands beyond cross-chain transfers

ATLAS pushes LayerZero into trading infrastructure after the company built its main business around moving assets and messages between blockchains.

LayerZero said its Omnichain Fungible Token standard has processed more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume spanning more than 160 networks. Assets using the framework include stablecoins and tokenized stocks.

The expansion follows a difficult period for LayerZero’s interoperability business after the April attack on Kelp DAO’s rsETH bridge.

Attackers drained 116,500 rsETH worth roughly $292 million from a LayerZero-enabled bridge on April 18 after compromising infrastructure used in the token’s cross-chain verification setup.

LayerZero later said the incident was limited to Kelp DAO’s configuration, which used a single decentralized verifier network, and maintained that its core protocol had not been compromised. Its incident report said attackers poisoned RPC infrastructure used by the verifier and used the compromised setup to pass a forged cross-chain message.

Following the attack, LayerZero said it would stop signing messages for applications using 1-of-1 verifier configurations and move affected integrations toward multi-verifier security. The company subsequently tightened bridge security around single-signer deployments.

Kelp DAO disputed parts of LayerZero’s account and later announced that rsETH would migrate to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol. The protocol said the rsETH migration plan was intended to strengthen security after the exploit, while Pellegrino rejected Kelp DAO’s claims about how its verifier configuration had been established.

Other projects also moved cross-chain infrastructure to Chainlink in the following weeks. By May, assets associated with migrations involving Kelp DAO, Lombard, Solv, Re.xyz and Kraken had exceeded $4 billion, according to an earlier report covering the move toward Chainlink CCIP.

Jack Melnick, who joined LayerZero from Berachain to lead strategy for Zero and ATLAS, said in an X post that ATLAS is the first product built on Zero.

Excited to announce that I’ve joined LayerZero to lead Strategy, focusing on GTM of Zero & ATLAS.

For the last four years, I’ve worked as a protocol builder, flirting with the cutting edge of what is feasible (and responsible) to build on blockchain. Those that have worked with… https://t.co/X3NfTx2C5j

— Cap'n Jack (@jackmelnick_) August 25, 2026

Melnick compared LayerZero’s expansion with the development of custodian banks, which became important settlement providers before adding trading services around assets they were already responsible for handling.