Kana Labs (Now Xyra Labs)

Kana Labs launched in 2021 as Kana Swap, a straightforward decentralized exchange built on Solana and the Neon EVM. Over the following four years it grew into one of the more ambitious multi-chain DeFi projects to emerge from the Solana ecosystem, expanding its product suite well beyond token swaps before completing a full rebrand to Xyra Labs on October 1, 2025. The core infrastructure and team remain the same; the new name signals a sharpened identity as the project matures from aggregator tool into a comprehensive on-chain trading platform.

From Solana DEX to Multi-Chain Super-App

The original problem Kana Labs set out to solve was straightforward: users navigating the fragmented early-2021 DeFi landscape had to juggle separate wallets, bridges, and liquidity pools on every chain they touched. The team's answer was a unified interface—first for Solana alone, then progressively extended to cover Aptos, Sui, Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and zkSync, nine blockchains in all.

At the core of the platform sits an AMM and DEX aggregator that routes swap orders through the deepest available liquidity on each supported chain. On Solana, the aggregator draws from Jupiter. On EVM chains it taps 1inch and OKX. For Aptos and Sui, Kana built its own proprietary liquidity aggregators. A three-step user flow—select chains and tokens, review optimal route, confirm transaction—abstracts the underlying complexity into something closer to a centralized exchange experience. Cross-chain swaps settle in five to fifteen minutes, with fail-safe mechanisms designed to prevent funds from going astray mid-bridge.

By the time of the Xyra Labs rebrand in late 2025, the platform had processed more than $10 billion in total swap volume and counted roughly 60,000 active users. About 30 percent of all transaction activity on the Aptos network ran through Kana Labs infrastructure at peak—a share that speaks to how thoroughly the project embedded itself in that ecosystem while maintaining its Solana roots.

Paymaster: Gas Infrastructure as a Product

One of Kana Labs' more distinctive contributions is its Paymaster system, a gas station infrastructure layer that sponsors blockchain transaction fees on behalf of users. This capability matters most on chains where gas can confuse or deter newcomers, and it underpins a broader push toward abstracting away the friction points that still prevent mainstream DeFi adoption.

The Paymaster has sponsored more than 340 million transactions and serves over 100,000 users who receive daily transaction sponsorships. The system is also available to third-party developers as a standalone SDK, giving wallets and dApps a plug-in path to offering gasless or gas-subsidized interactions without building the infrastructure themselves.

Perpetuals Trading

The platform's most significant product addition before the rebrand was a decentralized perpetual futures exchange built on a central limit order book (CLOB) model. Unlike AMM-based perpetuals that rely on liquidity pools and funding rate mechanics, a CLOB perpetuals platform matches buyers and sellers directly, reducing slippage and offering tighter spreads that more closely resemble what traders expect from a centralized venue.

The perps platform launched and crossed $1 billion in cumulative trading volume within its first 100 days, a milestone the team highlighted as validation for the thesis that on-chain trading can approach CEX-level execution quality. A Hedge Mode feature allows traders to hold simultaneous long and short positions on the same asset—standard functionality at major centralized venues, but still relatively uncommon in decentralized perpetuals at the time of launch.

Developer Tools

Alongside the consumer-facing products, Kana Labs has built out a developer-facing layer under the Kana Labs Build banner. The Web3 Aggregator SDK gives developers programmatic access to the same cross-chain routing and liquidity aggregation that powers the main trading interface. A lightweight Kana Widget lets projects embed cross-chain swap functionality directly into their own frontends with minimal integration work.

The Paymaster SDK mentioned above is also part of this layer. Together the tools are positioned as infrastructure primitives for teams building wallets, DeFi apps, or any product that needs seamless cross-chain movement of assets.

Funding and Partnerships

Kana Labs raised a $2 million seed round in October 2023 from a group of investors that included MARBLEX (a subsidiary of Korean gaming giant Netmarble), Gate.io, Aegis Ventures, Gate Technology, Kaia DLT Foundation, and CSP DAO. A pre-seed round prior to that was oversubscribed and valued the project at $21 million. The backing from MARBLEX and the Kaia DLT Foundation signals particular interest from the Korean gaming and mobile crypto ecosystem.

A notable partnership brought Kana Labs' Aptos DEX aggregator into SK Telecom's T Wallet, giving the trading infrastructure access to a mainstream South Korean consumer product. Geographic data from the rebrand announcement listed South Korea, Japan, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Spain, Turkey, and markets across Africa as regions where user growth has been concentrated.

The Xyra Labs Rebrand

The October 2025 rebrand was framed by the team as an evolution in identity rather than a pivot in strategy. The name Xyra draws on Greek roots—xyroz for sharpness and precision, and kyrios evoking authority and clarity—and is meant to reflect the platform's stated ambition to deliver professional-grade trading tools in a decentralized environment. The new domain is xyra.trade and the Twitter handle shifted to @xyralabs_.

The team's message to existing users was deliberately low-key: "nothing changes except the name." Existing products, user accounts, and integrations carried over. The rebrand coincided with the post-launch momentum from the perpetuals platform, suggesting the timing was chosen to signal maturation rather than course correction.

Current Status

As of mid-2026, Xyra Labs (the entity formerly known as Kana Labs) operates an active cross-chain DeFi platform with documented user activity across nine blockchains. Solana remains one of the key networks in the aggregator, with Jupiter serving as the primary liquidity source for Solana-native swaps. The platform continues to develop its developer SDK ecosystem and perpetuals trading infrastructure, with CEX-competitive execution quality as the stated north star for ongoing product work.