Introducing Atlas
Atlas is the blockchain for verifiable finance — a financial world where transparency, security, and performance coexist. Verifiable finance enables financial applications to combine the performance of traditional finance with the transparency of DeFi.
Atlas is purpose-built for verifiable finance
Ellipsis Labs is leading the development of Atlas. As high-frequency traders, systems engineers, and DeFi protocol developers, we understand the needs of the underlying infrastructure for verifiable finance.
We designed and built Phoenix, the leading orderbook spot exchange on Solana, which has done $50B in unincentivized spot trading volume. Atlas is inspired by our deep experience as application developers and addresses many of the issues that we experienced building financial primitives on general-purpose blockchains.
Atlas is built specifically for financial applications that require reliable transaction delivery, near-zero transaction costs, speed-of-light pre-confirmations, frequent and reliable oracle updates, and honest sequencing. We’ve made opinionated decisions that a neutral, general-purpose blockchain can’t.
Technical Details
Atlas is built on a custom, hyper-efficient implementation of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Existing Solana programs can be deployed out-of-the-box to take advantage of Atlas’s high performance, low fees, and low jitter. Atlas will be a Layer 2 blockchain that settles to Ethereum mainnet.
Ellipsis Labs developers engineered multiple breakthroughs for Atlas to be verifiable and secure while being performant enough to compete with traditional finance. We will describe them in a series of blog posts over the coming months, but they include:
- A custom implementation of the SVM, its memory mapping, and its state storage, enabling efficient state root computation and verification
- A modular software architecture that lowers the friction for developers to run Atlas nodes with custom extensions
- Design decisions on native bridging, data availability, and state diff schemas
- Opinionated transaction scheduler and fee mechanism designed for predictable and fast inclusion
- Block explorer optimized for financial applications
Roadmap
The Atlas private testnet is live today. A public testnet will be available later this year, followed by mainnet in Q2 2025.
Our mission is to support the verifiable finance applications that outperform what exists in traditional finance. If you are a developer interested in creating this better financial future, reach out to us here to apply for access to our private testnet. We’ll be rolling out access to the private testnet incrementally.
About Ellipsis Labs
Ellipsis Labs builds sustainable and efficient DeFi protocols on high-throughput decentralized infrastructure. Ellipsis Labs’ flagship protocol is Phoenix, a fully on-chain, decentralized limit orderbook on Solana.
