Venues must lock up 1% of ZRO supply to reach the top ATLAS rebate

LayerZero released ATLAS, a backend exchange system that operates on its Zero blockchain. Most of what is left after venue rebates goes toward buying and burning the ZRO token.

ZRO holders noticed quickly, and the token soared over 16% in 24 hours to $1.26.

Venues must stake 1% of ZRO supply for the top rebate

ATLAS charges a single all-in fee on every trade and then gives a rebate back to the venue that brought the volume.

On Open ATLAS, the rebate ranges from 20% to 65%, scaled to how much ZRO a venue stakes and the volume it drives, the company said.

A quarter of the remaining fee goes to the people that created the market. The other three quarters are used to buy ZRO on the open market and destroy it.

The burning mechanism makes exchange activity a constant buying pressure on the token and provides venues with an incentive to lock up supply.

LayerZero said the highest rebate tier requires a venue to stake up to 1% of the entire ZRO supply.

ATLAS is an acronym for Aggregated Trading, Liquidity, and Settlement. It’s a “headless exchange,” meaning it ships no consumer app and no front end of its own.

Brokers, crypto exchanges, and financial institutions can use ATLAS within their existing products and keep their own users, branding, and interface.

ATLAS combines matching, clearing, settlement, and risk management into one system. Each venue does not have to build its own or rent these services from a rival exchange. It divides participants into three roles.

The venues run the apps that customers use. Market creators decide what trades, including spot tokens, perpetuals, stocks, bonds, commodities, memes, and prediction markets. Market makers provide liquidity.

LayerZero is also building products for public crypto and prediction markets, as well as for institutions that set their own trading rules.

“We built ATLAS to be the neutral, performant backend to power them all,” LayerZero co-founder and CEO Bryan Pellegrino said in the announcement.

Today, we’re announcing an initial slate of partners for Open ATLAS: @GTE_XYZ, @Bullish, @definedfi, and @get_truenorth. pic.twitter.com/CzV1DNDdTj

— LayerZero (@LayerZero_Core) August 25, 2026

Kelp DAO moves to Chainlink after losing $292M

Besides funding buybacks, ZRO also performs the typical load-bearing functions on the underlying chain.

It secures Zero via delegated proof-of-stake, pays for gas, and votes in governance, LayerZero said.

The token is core to the security model and the fee economics. Staking it is the only way to reach the higher rebate tiers.

Back in February, LayerZero unveiled the finance-oriented zero-knowledge chain alongside Citadel Securities, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, ARK Invest, and Intercontinental Exchange, as Cryptopolitan reported at the time. ARK CEO Cathie Wood was on the advisory board at launch, and both ARK and Citadel bought ZRO.

ATLAS is the first product to ship on top of that chain, said Jack Melnick, who left Berachain to run strategy for Zero and ATLAS.

Melnick compared ATLAS to how custodian banks first held assets and then built trading around them.

Several projects have since moved cross-chain operations to Chainlink after an April attack drained 116,500 rsETH, worth some $292 million at the time, from a LayerZero-enabled bridge operated by Kelp DAO.

According to Cryptopolitan, Chainalysis attributed the exploit to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. Kelp has since migrated its own cross-chain routing to Chainlink’s interoperability protocol while hardening its verification model.

LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard has bridged over $290 billion in cross-chain volume across more than 160 blockchains, the company said. ATLAS launches later this year.

ZRO traded at $1.23, up 12.7% on the day and 58.3% over the past week, according to CoinGeco. It has $206.1 million in 24-hour volume.

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