LayerZero has confirmed Nov. 30 as the launch date for its Zero mainnet and ATLAS trading infrastructure. The rollout starts with Open ATLAS, which is expected to support more than a dozen trading venues at debut, with additional venues planned before the end of the year. ATLAS is described as a 'headless exchange' because it provides order matching, clearing, settlement and risk management behind third-party platforms rather than operating its own consumer application.
The trading engine will run in its own Zone on Zero, keeping its workload separate from payments and general-purpose applications. LayerZero has provisioned initial ATLAS capacity at 200,000 transactions per second, while the broader Zero roadmap targets up to 2 million transactions per second per Zone. Company-reported latency figures list a median below one millisecond, with 1.418 milliseconds at the 95th percentile and 2.641 milliseconds at the 99th percentile in a public-deployment environment.
ZRO is positioned as a central part of the new system. It will secure Zero, pay network gas fees, and give trading venues access to higher ATLAS rebates through staking. For Open ATLAS, venues can receive rebates ranging from 20% to 65% based on their ZRO stake, trading volume or both. After the venue rebate is deducted, LayerZero allocates 25% of remaining fees to market creators and 75% to buying and burning ZRO. The buy-and-burn mechanism could create sustained demand for ZRO if ATLAS trading activity grows.
Separately, Cardano’s Leios upgrade is moving toward a staged deployment aimed at expanding throughput without replacing the network’s existing consensus foundation. Input Output’s Oct. 20 update outlines an initial capacity target of three to five times current levels, with a longer-term path toward 15x subject to testing and governance approval. The rollout begins with the Dijkstra hard fork, which introduces the protocol changes required for Leios.
Before capacity increases can take effect, stake pool operators must register Boneh-Lynn-Shacham voting keys and demonstrate reliable network performance. Input Output estimates that voting keys must cover roughly 90% to 95% of delegated stake. Leios introduces endorser blocks alongside Cardano’s existing Praos ranking blocks, and endorser blocks require votes representing at least 75% of active stake for certification. Pools that have not registered voting keys can still produce Praos blocks but cannot participate in endorser-block voting.
Earlier engineering tests indicated nearly six times Cardano’s current Praos capacity. On MusashiNet, the development team recorded a peak of 26.8 TxkB/s, compared with a Praos mainnet ceiling of approximately 4.51 TxkB/s. Input Output plans controlled mainnet traffic exercises to assess block delivery, voting speed, certificate reliability and node performance before further capacity increases are approved through governance.
