LayerZero launches ATLAS exchange with Citadel Securities and DTCC as partners

LayerZero Labs just took one of the most ambitious swings in crypto infrastructure. The company, best known for connecting blockchains so they can talk to each other, announced ATLAS, a blockchain-based exchange designed specifically for financial institutions. Citadel Securities and DTCC, the entity that settles virtually every stock trade in the US, are partnering on the effort. What ATLAS actually is ATLAS is not another Coinbase or Binance competitor. It’s a backend infrastructure play, meaning regular users won’t interact with it directly. Instead, brokers, trading platforms, and regulated financial entities will plug into ATLAS to access digital asset liquidity. At launch, the platform will support spot digital asset token trading and perpetual futures. LayerZero has signaled that prediction contracts, traditional futures, and options trading will follow in subsequent phases. The exchange will run on Zero, a new heterogeneous Layer 1 blockchain built by LayerZero. Zero claims throughput of approximately 2 million transactions per second, a figure that would dwarf most existing blockchains if it holds up under real institutional load. For context, Solana’s theoretical maximum ...