YZi Labs, the family office and venture investment firm of Binance co-founders Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Yi He, has made a "multi-8-figure" investment in Genius Trading, a privacy-focused decentralized trading platform. The investment, confirmed to be well above $10 million, was finalized last month. As part of the deal, CZ has joined Genius Trading as an advisor.
Genius Trading is building a self-custodial, cross-chain terminal that offers spot, perpetual futures, and copy trading features, positioning itself as an onchain alternative to centralized exchanges like Binance. "If you were rebuilding Binance today, you wouldn’t do it as a centralized exchange — you’d build it onchain," said Ryan Myher, co-founder and COO of Genius.
The platform allows users to access liquidity across more than 10 blockchains—including Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Hyperliquid, Base, Avalanche, and Sui—without the need to bridge assets or switch wallets. A core feature of its technical roadmap is a privacy layer currently in beta, designed to shield large trading strategies by splitting trades across hundreds of wallets to reduce onchain traceability, avoiding execution delays associated with zero-knowledge systems. A public beta of this privacy protocol is planned for Q2 2026.
Since its soft launch in October 2025, Genius has processed over $60 million in trading volume, primarily from onchain whales. The platform utilizes a custom multi-party computation (MPC) wallet and proprietary cross-chain routing logic. CEO Armaan Kalsi stated the investment from YZi Labs represents "alignment more than anything else," providing a well-resourced backer to create an 'on-chain Binance'.
Prior to this investment, Genius had raised a total of $7 million, including a $6 million round in 2024 led by CMCC with participation from Balaji Srinivasan and Anthony Scaramucci. The company, founded in 2022 by a team from Yale University, currently employs 11 people and plans cautious hiring.
