Ellipsis Labs

Ellipsis Labs is a New York-based DeFi infrastructure company founded in 2022 by Eugene Chen and Jarry Xiao, two engineers with prior experience in high-frequency trading. The company's stated mission is to build infrastructure for verifiable finance — systems that match the performance of traditional financial venues while preserving the transparency and auditability of public blockchains. Ellipsis Labs has become one of the more technically ambitious builder teams on Solana, progressing from a single spot-trading protocol into a suite of products that now includes a perpetuals exchange and a new Layer 2 blockchain.

Phoenix Legacy: Solana's Fully On-Chain Spot Orderbook

The company's first major product, Phoenix Legacy (program address PhoeNiXZ8ByJGLkxNfZRnkUfjvmuYqLR89jjFHGqdXY), is a fully on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) for spot trading on Solana mainnet. The core design decision that distinguishes Phoenix from most other Solana DEXs is the elimination of the "crank" — the off-chain or asynchronous operator process that many orderbook protocols rely on to match and settle trades. Phoenix settles every trade atomically within a single Solana transaction, with no external sequencing step required.

Every market event — limit orders, fills, cancellations — is written directly to Solana's ledger, making the full live and historical state of any Phoenix market queryable on-chain. This differs from AMM-based venues, where liquidity is implicit in pool reserves rather than expressed as individual resting orders.

Phoenix is designed to be maximally composable. Because all settlement happens within a single transaction, other programs can wrap Phoenix instructions atomically — enabling strategies like on-chain arbitrage, liquidations that settle against Phoenix liquidity, or routing through Phoenix as part of a multi-protocol trade. The program uses a single account per market to hold all participant balances, which minimizes the number of accounts required per transaction and makes fitting complex composed instructions within Solana's transaction size limits practical.

Markets on Phoenix are permissionlessly listable with no admin controls baked into the program's upgrade path. The upgrade authority is held by a multisig with the intent to renounce it after a sufficient testing period, moving toward full immutability.

Since its 2023 mainnet launch, Phoenix Legacy has processed over $75 billion in cumulative spot trading volume with no incentive programs, making it the leading orderbook spot exchange on Solana by unincentivized volume. The protocol has also powered SolFi, an AMM built by Ellipsis Labs that routes through Phoenix's liquidity and has processed hundreds of billions of dollars in aggregated volume, briefly ranking among the top Solana DEXs by volume.

Security and Audits

Phoenix Legacy was audited by OtterSec prior to mainnet deployment. The audit report is publicly available in the phoenix-v1 GitHub repository, which is open-source under an MIT license. Ellipsis Labs and OtterSec jointly administer a bug bounty program for Phoenix's smart contract code, with rewards of up to $200,000 for critical vulnerability disclosures. The deployed program can be independently verified using the Solana Verify CLI, which checks that the on-chain binary matches the published source code at the known program ID.

Phoenix Perpetuals

Building on the spot exchange's infrastructure, Ellipsis Labs announced Phoenix Perpetuals, a fully on-chain perpetual futures exchange targeting professional traders on Solana. The design aims to cut trading costs by up to two-thirds compared to existing Solana perpetual platforms, with a stated goal of bringing on-chain perpetuals costs to parity with major centralized exchanges such as Binance.

Phoenix Perpetuals employs a hybrid execution model that combines aspects of orderbook trading with market-maker AMM liquidity provisioning, allowing liquidity providers to post and update quotes more cost-efficiently. Trading for retail participants is designed to be gasless, removing the friction of transaction fee overhead for end users. The platform targets sub-1 basis point slippage on multi-million dollar trades. As of mid-2025, Phoenix Perpetuals is in private beta with gradual access expansion through a structured waitlist at phoenix.trade.

Atlas: A Layer 2 for Verifiable Finance

In October 2024, Ellipsis Labs announced Atlas, a Layer 2 blockchain designed specifically for financial applications. Atlas uses a custom implementation of the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) as its execution layer, making it compatible with existing Solana programs without modification, while settling to Ethereum mainnet — combining Solana's execution performance with Ethereum's security and deep asset base.

Atlas was engineered to address infrastructure requirements that general-purpose blockchains cannot efficiently satisfy, including: reliable and predictable transaction inclusion, near-zero fees, pre-confirmation speeds measured in milliseconds, high-frequency oracle updates, and honest sequencing with resistance to front-running. The architecture includes a custom state root computation optimized for financial state, a specialized transaction scheduler, and a financial-specific block explorer. The design is modular, enabling node operators to run custom extensions.

Atlas launched on private testnet in 2024 and was targeting Q2 2025 for public mainnet. Its positioning as an SVM-based chain that settles to Ethereum places it in a category alongside other execution-layer experiments but with a deliberate focus on financial applications rather than general-purpose compute.

Team and Funding

Ellipsis Labs was co-founded by Eugene Chen (CEO) and Jarry Xiao, both of whom worked in high-frequency trading before entering crypto. The company is headquartered in New York.

Funding history:

• August 2023: $3.3 million seed round led by Electric Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures and Anagram.
• April 2024: $20 million Series A led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital, Justin Drake and Mike Neuder (Ethereum Foundation), Sreeram Kannan (EigenLayer), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Labs), and Uri Klarman (bloXroute).
• October 2024: $21 million round led by Haun Ventures to fund the Atlas L2, bringing total disclosed funding to approximately $44 million.

Ecosystem Fit

Ellipsis Labs occupies a position in the Solana DeFi stack oriented toward professional and institutional trading infrastructure rather than retail-facing AMM liquidity. Phoenix's crankless CLOB provides a composability primitive for protocols that need reliable on-chain price discovery and atomic settlement. Its open-source codebase and permissionless market creation make it a building block for other developers, and the team has published DeFi research through its Umbra Research initiative and released tools such as a Verifiable Build CLI that helps developers confirm that deployed programs match their public source.

The expansion into perpetuals and the Atlas L2 represents a progression from single-chain market infrastructure toward a broader vision of financial infrastructure that spans execution environments, with Solana's performance model as a consistent throughput foundation.