Ellipsis Labs

Ellipsis Labs is a Solana-native infrastructure company building on-chain trading primitives. Its flagship product, Phoenix, is a fully on-chain central limit order book (CLOB) that has processed over $75 billion in spot trading volume. The team has since expanded its stack to include SolFi, a proprietary AMM, and Phoenix Perps, a perpetual futures platform entering private beta. The company frames its work as building the foundation for verifiable finance: open, composable, and settled entirely on-chain.

Core Mechanism: Phoenix Order Book

Phoenix is a CLOB DEX deployed on Solana Mainnet. Rather than using an automated market maker model, Phoenix routes liquidity through a traditional order book where market makers submit limit orders matched using price-time priority. This design mirrors how liquidity is organized on professional venues, offering tighter spreads for large trades compared to constant-product AMMs.

The defining technical property is that Phoenix is crankless. Most on-chain order books on Solana historically required asynchronous background transactions called cranks to process fills and update state. Phoenix settles trades atomically within the same transaction as the order placement, eliminating crank dependency and reducing both latency and fee overhead. All market data—order placements, cancellations, and fills—is recorded on-chain, making the full order book state and history queryable without relying on off-chain indexers.

Phoenix also emphasizes composability. Its minimal account structure allows other programs to include Phoenix interactions within larger instruction sets, enabling protocols and aggregators to build tightly integrated routing on top of a shared liquidity source rather than fragmenting liquidity across isolated pools.

Market listings on Phoenix are permissionless: any token pair can be listed without administrative approval, and the program was designed with the intention that Ellipsis Labs would eventually renounce upgrade authority after sufficient battle-testing in production.

SolFi AMM

In 2024, Ellipsis Labs introduced SolFi, a proprietary AMM system designed to address active liquidity management on Solana. SolFi is positioned as a complementary liquidity layer to the Phoenix order book, providing spreads competitive with major centralized exchanges for on-chain trades. By the time of Phoenix Perps' announcement, SolFi had completed hundreds of billions in cumulative volume.

Phoenix Perps

Phoenix Perps is Ellipsis Labs' perpetual futures platform built on the same infrastructure lineage as the spot order book and SolFi. The platform targets professional traders with low latency and low fees, and uses an AMM-style architecture that allows market makers to quote and update liquidity cheaply. This supports tighter spreads and deeper books compared to vAMM-based perpetuals designs. Retail traders access the platform with gasless trading, removing one friction point common in on-chain derivatives.

As of mid-2025, Phoenix Perps was in private beta with access expanding gradually through a structured rollout. It does not yet have a confirmed public launch date.

Atlas

Ellipsis Labs also lists Atlas among its products: a Layer 2 blockchain designed to deliver high-performance DeFi at Ethereum scale with Solana-grade throughput. Atlas is described as separate infrastructure enabling verifiable finance applications beyond what is possible on either Solana or Ethereum alone, though public technical documentation on Atlas remains limited relative to Phoenix and SolFi.

Tokens and Assets

Ellipsis Labs has not issued a protocol token. Phoenix operates as a fee-based exchange with no native governance token announced as of the time of writing. There is no liquidity mining program or token incentive layer attached to the order book.

Security and Audits

Phoenix was designed with verifiability as a core property. Before its mainnet launch, the team committed to publishing program source code with verified builds, allowing independent confirmation that deployed on-chain bytecode matches the published source. Ellipsis Labs also built and open-sourced a Verifiable Build CLI tool for the broader Solana developer ecosystem. Upgrade authority over the Phoenix program is held by a multisig controlled by the Ellipsis Labs team, with a stated intent to renounce authority after the protocol demonstrates sufficient stability in production.

No specific third-party audit reports are surfaced in public-facing documentation, though the open-source codebase (available on GitHub at Ellipsis-Labs/phoenix-v1) enables community review.

Team and Funding

Ellipsis Labs was founded in mid-2023 and raised a $3.3 million seed round in August 2023 led by Electric Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures and Anagram. In April 2024, Paradigm led a $20 million Series A. Additional participants in the Series A included Electric Capital, Justin Drake and Mike Neuder of the Ethereum Foundation, Sreeram Kannan of EigenLayer, Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana Labs, and Uri Klarman of bloXroute. The participation of Solana Labs' founder alongside Ethereum Foundation researchers reflects the team's positioning as infrastructure builders rather than protocol partisans.

The team also operates Umbra Research, a publicly available DeFi research initiative covering on-chain market structure topics.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Phoenix addresses one of the persistent gaps in Solana's DeFi stack: a professional-grade, crankless order book capable of hosting market makers who operate on latency-sensitive strategies. Most Solana DEX volume has historically flowed through AMMs, which impose predictable losses on liquidity providers and deliver suboptimal pricing for large trades. Phoenix's CLOB model allows professional market makers to compete on spread rather than accepting impermanent loss, which in practice has produced tighter quoted spreads on-chain.

The composable design means Phoenix functions as shared infrastructure. Aggregators, routers, and other protocols can route through Phoenix liquidity without requiring users to interact with Phoenix directly, making the order book a building block rather than just a standalone venue. SolFi extends this by complementing the order book with AMM liquidity where it is more efficient. Together, these layers represent a bet that Solana can support an on-chain liquidity stack that approaches the efficiency of centralized exchange infrastructure.