LayerZero Announces ATLAS, a Headless Exchange for the Future of Global Markets

• ATLAS is a first-of-its-kind global market infrastructure designed for the next generation of global markets
   
• Built for both open and institutional markets, ATLAS has no app and no venue of its own; operators run their own trading environments and keep their users
   
• One engine handles matching, clearing, settlement and risk, work that today requires four separate systems and sets of fees across institutional markets
   
• ATLAS delivers sub-millisecond p50 latency and 2.641ms p99 latency at current stress tests
   
• Built to leverage the full capabilities of Zero, LayerZero's blockchain designed for the scale of global markets

VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- LayerZero, the leading interoperability protocol behind more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume, today announced ATLAS (Aggregated Trading, Liquidity, and Settlement), a first-of-its-kind global market infrastructure for both open and institutional operators to run their own trading venues without having to build their own exchange.

"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," said Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero. "We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all."

In institutional markets, 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, and is why an equity trade still takes a day to settle. ATLAS runs all four as a single system.

Unlike every major crypto exchange today, ATLAS has no consumer application and no trading venue of its own. Instead, trading platforms and financial institutions use ATLAS to operate their own venues, keeping their users and earning fees on the volume without having to build their own exchange.

The total value of stablecoins in circulation exceeds $300 billion, and tokenized real-world-assets have reached $33 billion, but the venues where those assets trade must evolve. Until now a firm that wanted a modern trading venue had two options: build an exchange from scratch, or become a customer of a rival. ATLAS eliminates that choice.

ATLAS supports open and institutional markets on the same engine. Open markets are available to anyone. Meanwhile, institutions are able to control who trades within their venue, with markets that reflect the rules the institution chooses to enforce. Because both types of markets operate on the same stack, market makers can easily price across all venues with minimal latency.

ATLAS leverages the full capabilities of Zero, the blockchain LayerZero announced in February in collaboration with Citadel Securities, DTCC, ARK Invest, and Intercontinental Exchange, built for the scale of global markets. In development for two and a half years, Zero verifies every trade on-chain via ZK proof, with fast and final settlement that's cryptographically provable by anyone.

ATLAS launches later this year.

About LayerZero

LayerZero is the interoperability protocol that allows assets and applications to move across blockchains. LayerZero powers the OFT Standard and has facilitated more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume across 165 blockchains. LayerZero is the infrastructure behind Zero, the high-performance blockchain announced in February in collaboration with Citadel Securities, DTCC, ARK Invest and Intercontinental Exchange. Learn more at https://layerzero.network/.

SOURCE LayerZero Labs