Appchain & L2 venture studio / Incubator
Layer Labs is an appchain and L2 venture studio and incubator. We help builders navigate a fragmented service industry — architecture and stack selection through tokenomics, liquidity, governance, and go-to-market.
Sequencer Block time 2.00s Blocks 0000 Sequencer revenue → you
Deploying is the easy part — rollup-as-a-service made sure of that. What is hard is everything the deployment doesn’t include: a data availability layer you won’t regret, a bridge people actually use, a token that survives its own emissions, an ecosystem that shows up on day one. Every piece is a different counterparty, a different contract, a different quarter of your life — and most of them are one-way doors, decided early, on incomplete information, and lived inside for years.
Layer Labs runs the whole surface of an appchain launch in-house and brings partners in where partners are genuinely better. The disciplines below are specified together, because each one constrains the others.
Stack selection across the major rollup frameworks and the rollup-as-a-service providers building on them — we hold no allegiance to any of them, because the framework matters far less than what you do with it. Data availability, settlement and sequencing are the choices that compound, and sequencer design is where most of the user experience actually lives: a fast, accountable set protects users better than a slow one wearing the right badge.
Supply, emissions, fee routing, and sequencer revenue, designed as one system. Plus a governance surface that can survive contact with a real community rather than a forum thread.
Cross-chain routes, canonical and third-party bridges, and the market structure that makes your chain somewhere worth arriving at on the day it opens.
Naming, identity, positioning, and launch. What your chain is for, said in a way people repeat without being asked to.
Ecosystem grant programmes, foundation support, and introductions to investors who underwrite infrastructure rather than react to it.
Security review, integration partners, and the infrastructure, custody, and exchange relationships a chain needs lined up before it needs them.
Why a chain, and not a contract. We pressure-test the case for owning a layer before anyone writes a line of Solidity — and we will tell you when the answer is no.
Stack, data availability, settlement, sequencing, and economics, specified in one pass. Decided separately, they contradict each other; decided together, they compound.
Our rollup-as-a-service partners deploy. We run the integrations, the audits, the testnet, and the long tail of things that only break in public.
Liquidity, listings, grants, community, and the first real users. Then the part most studios leave you to: operating an ecosystem once the launch post has scrolled away.
Partnership announcement
The blockchain for real-world asset yield on Optimism
Tokenising an asset is the easy part now. Treasuries, private credit, equities — the wrappers exist and the custodians are licensed. The hard part is what happens next: most tokenised assets land on-chain as certificates, sitting inert in a wallet, earning nothing and collateralising nothing. Clearpool came to us with the question of whether fixing that needed a chain of its own. It did.
Market figures as publicly reported through mid-2026, excluding stablecoins.
A launcher that mints a compliant RWA with no contract code — financial assets like treasuries, bonds, ETFs and equities, and physical ones down to real estate, metals and watches. Each is issued against a licensed custodian rather than a wrapper contract, which is the difference between a token an institution can hold and one it cannot.
Tokenised private credit is now the second-largest RWA category on-chain, and it works best in the vault shape: deposit a stablecoin, hold one token that represents a claim on a curated strategy — senior secured lending, structured receivables, short-duration paper. Ozean is built to host those vaults natively rather than bridge them in from somewhere else.
Tokenised equities are the fastest-growing RWA category, because a stock token settles in seconds, trades on weekends, and is reachable from anywhere with a wallet. The demand is proven — the open question is which chain the compliant, institutionally custodied version lives on.
A tokenised asset you can only hold is a certificate. One you can post as margin is infrastructure. On Solana this is already real: tokenised stocks are accepted as collateral to borrow against, and lending against them has become a market of its own. Ozean is designed so credit and equity positions are collateral from day one, not in a later release.
Stablecoins bridged to Ozean convert to ozUSD, backed on-chain by short-term treasury notes and rebasing daily at 1:1. The yield stops at the user rather than the issuer — the opposite of how the major stablecoins distribute the return on their reserves.
Permissioned DeFi had become silos — every protocol its own KYC, none of them interoperable. Ozean is permissionless at the core with an opt-in compliance layer: a DID token carries a user’s verification, each protocol sets its own bar, anon and permissioned users coexist on one chain. Without this, no custodian lists a regulated asset.
Curve shape and the USDX6M duration yield as specified in the 2024 design brief. Illustrative, not live market data.
Around it we built the network the chain needed to matter: a liquidity route through Base, and Aerodrome as the main DEX.
Ozean is not a bet against the market — it is a bet on where the market is already going. Through 2026 the largest names in retail and institutional finance each concluded that tokenised assets need purpose-built infrastructure. They picked different stacks and different asset classes, and they are all describing the same shape.
Mainnet in July 2026 on Arbitrum Orbit, settling to Ethereum, with 95 tokenised stocks trading around the clock across 120 countries and DeFi protocols live on day one. The clearest signal yet that distribution at scale now wants its own chain rather than a contract on someone else’s.
On Solana, xStocks passed ten billion dollars of traded volume within four months of launch, and Ondo Global Markets listed 200+ US stocks and ETFs routed through Jupiter. Tokenised equities went from a pitch-deck category to a live market inside a year.
Kamino took tokenised stocks as collateral and ended up with the large majority of that lending market on Solana. This is the step that turns a tokenised asset from a holding into a balance sheet — and the one most RWA chains have not built for.
Nest puts institutional credit strategies behind a single deposit token, sourcing from managers including BlackRock, Hamilton Lane and WisdomTree. It is the clearest template for how tokenised private credit reaches an ordinary wallet — and it is a competitor worth watching closely.
Third-party figures as publicly reported through mid-2026. These projects are market context, not Ozean partners.
Ozean is the fullest example of the first half. A studio that only advises drifts, though, so we also develop projects in-house — for the same reason a workshop keeps its own bench: what you learn operating a chain, through the incidents and the emissions and the quiet months after launch, is not available from the outside.
Studio / Chains built with founders and partners
An appchain supporting Synthetix, with Layer Labs backing the deployment and ecosystem work around it.
In-house / Projects we develop and operate ourselves
A DeFi ecosystem built around Bitcoin, developed on our own book to contribute working infrastructure to the appchain ecosystem rather than commentary about it.
Studio intake / Direct to the founders
Tell us what the chain is for and who it is for. If the case holds, we will show you the architecture, the economics, and the launch plan before you commit to anything.