Morning Minute: LayerZero Announces ATLAS as New Settlement Engine

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors are slightly red, HYPE outperforms; BTC at $78.7k
• BTC ETFs see another $320M inflows; ETH outperforms with $180M
• Hyperliquid activates AQAv2, routing more fees to buybacks & burns (and touts new lending feature)
• LayerZero introduces ATLAS as new settlement and trading engine (ZRO +10%)
• Pistacio soars 200x as Pump.fun sees biggest revenue day since Sept 2025

🏛️ LayerZero Wants to Be the Plumbing Behind Every Exchange

LayerZero spent six years building rails to move tokens between blockchains. On Tuesday it announced ATLAS, a trading and settlement engine designed to sit underneath exchanges rather than compete with them. ZRO was trading near $1 earlier in the session and jumped more than 20% on the news.

ATLAS has no app and no frontend. Trading venues plug into it, keep their own interface and customers, and skip building matching, clearing, settlement, and risk systems themselves. LayerZero’s argument is that venues built on existing exchanges always end up competing with that exchange’s own app, and institutions won’t put their core business on rails a competitor operates. They are shipping two versions: one for crypto apps and prediction markets, and one for firms that need to enforce their own rules on the same engine. Markets can range from spot and perps to stocks, bonds, commodities, and predictions.

ZRO is wired into all of it. Venues stake the token for fee rebates of 20% to 65%, and after those rebates, 75% of what’s left buys and burns ZRO while 25% goes to whoever created the market. That turns the token into a claim on trading volume, which is why the announcement moved the price.

This major announcement comes at a critical time for the LayerZero ecosystem. In April, attackers took roughly $292 million from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge, and protocols have been leaving since, including BitGo’s $7.7 billion in wrapped Bitcoin and Wyoming’s state stablecoin, roughly $15 billion in total. It’s been a big exodus. But now momentum is returning. And LayerZero has built the infrastructure to house all the biggest winners of this upcoming cycle in perps, tokenized stocks, prediction markets and broader RWAs. Now we’ll see how potential partners respond…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are slightly red with HYPE leading; BTC -0.6% at $78.4k; ETH even at $2,460; SOL -2% at $97; HYPE +3% at $82
• Top alt movers include ZRO (+10%), SPX (+10%) and PYTH (+4%)
• Oil -2% at $80; Gold -0.5% at $4,670
• Stock futures are flat ahead of PCE and NVIDIA earnings; DOW even, Nasdaq -0.1%
• Crypto-margined Bitcoin futures fell to about 12% of open interest from near 100% in 2019 and 2020, with $570.08 million liquidated over 24 hours
• The Crypto Fear and Greed Index hit 81, “extreme greed,” for the first time since late 2024, climbing 45 points in 30 days
• Goldman Sachs raised its Coinbase target to $196 from $173 on Tuesday, keeping a Buy & pointing to derivatives and prediction markets, while Canaccord lifted Strategy to $175 from $130 on what it called a materially brighter setup
• The Blockchain Association urged regulators to keep stablecoin identity checks at the issuer level, warning that extending KYC to peer-to-peer transfers would “cripple the industry”
• Thirty-nine state banking associations signed on to the BankChain Alliance, a bank-owned network for tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and payments targeting a 2027 launch
• A federal jury convicted Block Bits Capital founder Japheth Dillman of wire fraud and conspiracy for raising nearly $1 million on trading software he knew did not work.
• Security firm Socket linked 77 Firefox extensions to a wallet-stealing campaign, confirming 40 as malicious impersonations of OKX, Rabby, and TronLink
• Japan’s FSA, Finance Ministry, and central bank will form a study group this summer on blockchain rails for around-the-clock settlement of stocks and government bonds

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were red; DOGE -4%, SHIB -3%, PEPE -5%, PENGU -4%, TRUMP -5%, BONK -5%; Fartcoin +17% to $213M
• Robinhood chain saw major gains again; PONS +40% to $88M, AI +35%, DELTA +40%, YOLO +45% and NET +110%; Cashcat +10% at $225M
• Solana leaders included Pistacio (+200x), Martians (+50x), and nosis (+260%); Ansem +10% at $280M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly green, led by Pudgy’s; Punks even at 32.45 ETH, BAYC -2% at 8 ETH, Pudgy +7% at 4.5 ETH
• RH Machines (+46%) and Hedgehogs (+18%) led top movers
• FWAIR PFPs fell 11% to a 2.88 ETH floor while the Token Works team published a post mortem from the first launch