LayerZero unveils ATLAS trading engine as ZRO jumps 30%

LayerZero's ZRO token rose more than 30% to about $1.29 after the interoperability firm unveiled ATLAS, a trading engine built on its Zero blockchain.

"The world's global asset base is expanding faster than ever before," Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and chief executive officer of LayerZero, said in a statement. "We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all."

ATLAS, short for Aggregated Trading Liquidity and Settlement, combines trade matching, clearing, settlement and risk management in one system, LayerZero said Tuesday. Markets could range from spot crypto and perpetual futures to stocks, bonds, commodities and prediction markets. The engine ships in two configurations: Open ATLAS for crypto trading apps and prediction markets, and Institutional ATLAS for exchanges and financial firms that set their own market rules.

Venues keep between 20 percent and 65 percent of the trading fee depending on how much ZRO they stake and volume they route. After venue rebates, 75 percent of remaining fees buy and burn ZRO, reducing supply, while 25 percent goes to whoever created the market. The launch comes as stablecoins and tokenization put more financial assets onchain, raising the question of where those assets will trade.

LayerZero's move broadens its ambitions beyond moving assets between chains and into the markets where those assets trade. In February, the firm announced Zero with partners including DTCC, ICE and Google Cloud, plus a strategic investment from Citadel Securities. DTCC and ICE are exploring institutional market applications, according to the release.

ATLAS has no frontend of its own. Trading venues plug into the infrastructure while keeping their own interface and customers. LayerZero said the design removes the incentive for sophisticated traders to bypass a venue and trade directly against the underlying exchange.

The company said ATLAS delivers sub-millisecond median latency in a test environment, with 1.418 milliseconds at the 95th percentile and 2.641 milliseconds at the 99th. At launch the system will be provisioned for 200,000 transactions per second. None of those figures come from a live deployment — LayerZero has given no launch date for ATLAS, and Zero itself has not reached mainnet.

ZRO traded at $1.29 at 16:01 UTC, up 12.5 percent on the day and 63 percent over the past week, according to CoinGecko. Its market cap is $454 million on $170 million of 24-hour volume. The token bottomed at $1.06 at 09:00 UTC, hours before the announcement. ZRO is down about 83 percent from its December 2024 peak of $7.47.

The expansion follows a rough patch for LayerZero's cross-chain business. Several protocols moved away from its bridging infrastructure after attackers stole about $292 million worth of assets from Kelp DAO's LayerZero-powered bridge in April. LayerZero's incident report said Kelp's rsETH bridge had been downgraded from a two-of-two to a one-of-one decentralized verifier network configuration before the exploit, and that a LayerZero developer had been socially engineered six weeks earlier. LayerZero now requires at least three-of-three verification by default.

The announcement ties ZRO's fee capture to volume the protocol does not itself distribute. Every user reaches ATLAS through a third-party application. The fee split is the mechanism LayerZero has been building toward since STG holders approved a takeover of the Stargate bridge in August 2025, a token swap valued at about $110 million.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.