LayerZero has rolled out ATLAS, exchange infrastructure for crypto and tokenized markets built on its Zero blockchain. Citadel Securities, DTCC, and Intercontinental Exchange were among the institutional partners named when Zero launched earlier this year.
The acronym stands for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity and Settlement. Matching, clearing, settlement, and risk management all live inside one system. LayerZero calls it a “headless exchange”: there is no consumer app. Crypto exchanges, brokers, and financial institutions plug into the backend while keeping their own users and interfaces.
What that looks like in practice: a trading venue runs its front end, and ATLAS handles order matching and settlement on Zero. That chain was announced in February in collaboration with Citadel Securities, DTCC, ARK Invest, and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). It uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify trades onchain and was purpose-built for financial markets.
Two market types are supported. Open markets serve crypto applications, prediction markets, and public trading products. Institutional markets let operators set their own rules around who trades and under what conditions. Three groups plug into the system: trading venues run the user-facing platforms, market creators define the assets, and market makers supply liquidity.
Those assets span spot tokens, perpetuals, stocks, commodities, bonds, memes, and prediction markets. ATLAS is expected to launch later this year.
“The world’s global asset base is expanding faster than ever before,” Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero, said in a statement. “It is globally accessible, continuously available, and includes an increasingly large number of assets with sufficient depth and liquidity to build meaningful markets around. We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all.”
Tokenomics tie ZRO directly to ATLAS activity. The token secures Zero through delegated proof-of-stake, works as the gas token, and handles governance. Trading venues can stake ZRO to qualify for higher fee rebates; the highest tier requires up to one percent of ZRO supply. ATLAS charges one all-in trading fee. In Open ATLAS, venues receive rebates ranging from 20% to 65% based on ZRO stake or trading volume. After that rebate, 25% of remaining fees go to market creators and 75% is used to buy and burn ZRO.
Jack Melnick, who recently joined LayerZero from Berachain to lead strategy for Zero and ATLAS, said in an X post that ATLAS is the first product built on top of Zero. He compared LayerZero’s move into exchange infrastructure to how custodian banks became central to settlement and later added trading services.
ZRO climbed more than 16% over the past 24 hours, trading at $1.26, according to The Block’s price page.
The launch arrives against a harder backdrop. Several firms recently moved cross-chain operations from LayerZero to Chainlink following an April 2026 attack on Kelp DAO’s rsETH bridge. That exploit drained 116,500 rsETH, worth about $292 million at the time, from the LayerZero-enabled bridge. LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) Standard has supported more than $290 billion in cross-chain volume across more than 160 blockchains, including stablecoins and tokenized stocks.
Which trading venues and institutions will run on ATLAS at launch is not yet known. LayerZero has not named committed launch partners beyond the institutions tied to Zero itself.
